SATURDAY, JULY 4, 2026|No. 5727
Technology · AI Security

AI-Assisted Bug Discovery Linked to Historic Surge in Vulnerability Disclosures

The number of high- and critical-severity CVEs jumped more than 3.5-fold in June 2026 following Anthropic's announcement that Claude Mythos Preview could autonomously discover software flaws.

Graph showing monthly high- and critical-severity CVEs from 2022 to mid-2026, with a sharp spike after April 2026.
Graph showing monthly high- and critical-severity CVEs from 2022 to mid-2026, with a sharp spike after April 2026. · Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash
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Severe cybersecurity vulnerability disclosures (CVEs) spiked in 2026. In June, notable organizations published around 1,500 high- and critical-severity CVEs — more than 3.5× the monthly record prior to Mythos’ release.

Disclosure of serious cyber vulnerabilities spiked around the release of Claude Mythos Preview

Claude Mythos Preview announced20222023202420252026020040060080010001200Number of CVEsSeverityCriticalHigh

CVEs from AWS, Apache, Apple, Cisco, Google, Linux, Microsoft, Mozilla, NVIDIA, Oracle, Red Hat, Adobe, IBM, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, SAP, VMware, GitHub, and OpenSSL. Reporting procedures, labeling, and cadence vary substantially between organizations.

The spike follows Anthropic’s April announcement that Claude Mythos Preview could autonomously discover software vulnerabilities, and that the company’s Project Glasswing partners — including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and AWS — had been using it to find and fix bugs ahead of the model’s public release. Since its commencement, Project Glasswing claims to have found over 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities, many of which have yet to be individually disclosed. Similar efforts have been undertaken by OpenAI with their Daybreak product.

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In April 2026, Anthropic announced that its latest internal model (Claude Mythos Preview) was capable of autonomous cybersecurity vulnerability discovery and exploitation. Since then, both Anthropic and OpenAI have launched efforts to use frontier models to harden critical software before malicious actors are able to use the same models for harm.

We show that the number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) jumped significantly following these announcements. Compared to the previous monthly record before the Mythos Preview announcement, the number of high- and critical-severity vulnerabilities increased more than 3.5x in June.

Data

Our Cyber Vulnerability Reports hub visualizes data from cve.org, a public repository of CVE reports from software companies and third-party security researchers. We focus our analysis on CVEs reported by 21 notable organizations to avoid capturing noisy submissions from less reputable sources. These notable organizations include:

Microsoft · Google · Apple · Adobe · Oracle · Cisco · IBM · Red Hat · Intel · AMD · NVIDIA · Qualcomm · Samsung · SAP · Amazon (AWS) · VMware (Broadcom) · GitHub (own products) · Linux · Mozilla · Apache · OpenSSL

Assumptions and limitations

Our figures come from publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, which do not include discovered but not publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. Anthropic claims that their Project Glasswing alone has identified over 10,000 high- and critical-severity vulnerabilities.

While some of the increase in observed vulnerability disclosure is almost certainly due to increased feasibility of discovery, the spike may also be caused in part by an increase in the amount of interest in discovering bugs.

PAN's pipeline reviewed approximately 1 open sources for this article. No human editor reviewed this article before publication.

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