Comment

Comment by ievans

Not super surprising that Anthropic is shipping a vulnerability detection feature -- OpenAI announced Aardvark back in October (https://openai.com/index/introducing-aardvark/) and Google announced BigSleep in Nov 2024 (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/clo...).

The impact question is really around scale; a few weeks ago Anthropic claimed 500 "high-severity" vulnerabilities discovered by Opus 4.6 (https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/). There's been some skepticism about whether they are truly high severity, but it's a much larger number than what BigSleep found (~20) and Aardvark hasn't released public numbers.

As someone who founded a company in the space (Semgrep), I really appreciated that the DARPA AIxCC competition required players using LLMs for vulnerability discovery to disclose $cost/vuln and the confusion matrix of false positives along with it. It's clear that LLMs are super valuable for vulnerability discovery, but without that information it's difficult to know which foundation model is really leading.

What we've found is that giving LLM security agents access to good tools (Semgrep, CodeQL, etc.) makes them significantly better esp. when it comes to false positives. We think the future is more "virtual security engineer" agents using tools with humans acting as the appsec manager. Would be very interested to hear from other people on HN who have been trying this approach!

parent ievans 8 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton