AI finds bug hitting up to 70% of websites; 4 nations go offline

The discovery flips the usual narrative around AI and security. Rather than automating attacks, AI here surfaced a flaw so widespread that four governments — France, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands — chose to pull their websites offline on Wednesday rather than wait. The co-founder of Google's Wiz team told The Wall Street Journal that humans probably could not have found it without AI, which suggests the tool is becoming a genuine detection aid rather than only a threat.

The same capability cuts both ways. Once fixes are public, a cybersecurity researcher told Reuters, AI can help attackers reverse engineer the bug in a "race to exploit" it, with the stated next step being "mass compromise of every vulnerable web server on the internet." That puts the emphasis on speed of patching: Japan's prime minister urged "everyone to take action tonight," a signal that the window between disclosure and exploitation may be measured in hours rather than weeks. The episode is likely to sharpen debate over how quickly AI-found vulnerabilities should be disclosed, and to whom.