AI Industrialized the Vuln Lifecycle and Broke the System of Record
VulnCheck's Patrick Garrity on the NVD collapse, the first real AI disclosure wave, and why remediation, not finding bugs, is the bottleneck.DescriptionVulnerability management spent years as the chore everyone dreaded, and now it is one of the hottest topics in security because attackers made exploitation the number one way in. Patrick Garrity of VulnCheck rejoins the show to separate what is real from what is marketing. We get into the honest state of the NIST National Vulnerability Database after CISA pulled its funding, the new AI executive order that wants a clearinghouse for AI-discovered vulnerabilities, the first measurable wave of AI-assisted disclosures, and Patrick's audit of Anthropic's Glasswing ledger. We also dig into why cheap AI discovery makes the remediation bottleneck worse, how AI is raising the security poverty line, and whether the 90-day disclosure model still holds.Key takeawaysVulnerability management is hot again because attackers made it the top way in. As Patrick puts it, attention flows to wherever the attacker goes, and right now that is exploitation.The NIST NVD breakdown was worse than a backlog. A recent report confirmed CISA had stopped funding the NVD and NIST lost about half its funding, with no real plan to clear the backlog, which quietly hurts every defender who relies on enriched CVE data.A new AI executive order wants a clearinghouse for AI-discovered vulnerabilities, reportedly under Treasury. Patrick's reaction is that we already have a vulnerability database, the program is optional, and it may turn into a marketing race more than a coordination win.The first measurable AI disclosure wave is real. CVE volumes are up 563 percent for Chrome and GitHub advisories up 470 percent year to date, and Patrick separated genuine AI-assisted discovery from AI slop and from bugs that merely live in AI software by correlating researchers, domains, and email addresses across multiple advisory sources.Patrick audited Anthropic's Glasswing ledger and found the transparency lacking. He had around 80 vulnerabilities in his own database while the public ledger listed 27, several items had blown past their own 90-day disclosure window, and the ledger had not been updated in two weeks.Finding vulnerabilities is not the bottleneck, remediation is. AI makes discovery cheap, but the coordinated disclosure and fix process takes enormous human effort, and the median time to remediate even known exploited bugs is still measured in weeks.Exploitation looks like it is sustaining rather than surging. CISA KEV and VulnCheck KEV are tracking similar year-over-year volumes, partly because attackers already have more than enough to target and partly because you can only count the exploitation you can actually detect.AI is raising the security poverty line, at least for now. Token costs and access-restricted tools concentrate the most powerful discovery capabilities among well-funded teams, while smaller organizations lack the expertise to turn open-weight models into working vulnerability harnesses.The economics are circular. AI drives the surge in findings and attacker velocity, and AI is then sold as the fix, so teams pay to surface the problem and pay again to remediate it, all on consumption-based pricing against finite budgets.The 90-day disclosure norm mostly holds, though it may tighten. VulnCheck runs a strict 120-day policy with no exceptions and averages 45 to 48 days to fix and disclose, and for open source the fixing commit often makes the flaw public anyway.
