OpenAI's automated vulnerability pipeline discovers 1,724 Linux kernel vulnerabilities

OpenAI's automated vulnerability research pipeline identified 2,308 candidate Linux kernel vulnerabilities, dynamically reproduced and confirmed 1,724 vulnerabilities, and generated 948 local privilege escalation (LPE) exploits. The pipeline consists of five stages: vulnerability discovery, dynamic verification, exploitability assessment, patch generation, and human review; the full second scan cost approximately $1.21 million in API credits. Estimated by bug bounty standards, these 948 exploits are worth between $18.9 million and $66.3 million, 16 to 55 times the pipeline cost; the agent used 10 entirely new exploitation techniques, which third-party kernel vulnerability experts have verified as novel methods, and OpenAI is submitting the vulnerability information and corresponding patches to Linux kernel maintainers.