We built a vulnerability vending machine: AI tokens in, zero-days out

{"title":"Someone Built an AI Pipeline That Turns Compute Into Zero-Days","body":"According to BleepingComputer, researchers have built and described what they're calling a \"vulnerability vending machine\" -- an automated pipeline where AI tokens go in and working zero-day vulnerabilities come out. The framing is deliberate: vulnerability research, once a scarce, labor-intensive craft practiced by a small pool of specialists, is being reframed as a metered, scalable service you can essentially buy by the token.\n\nThis is the same trajectory every offensive security capability has followed once it gets automated: fuzzing went from bespoke scripts to commercial platforms, exploit development went from artisanal to templated, and now vulnerability discovery itself is getting the assembly-line treatment. The pattern that matters isn't the specific tool -- it's that whatever a well-resourced research team can automate today, a well-resourced attacker (state-backed or criminal) can replicate within a fairly short window, because the barrier to entry is compute and prompting skill, not decades of specialized expertise. Every prior wave of \"we automated the hard part\" security tooling has diffused into offense faster than defenders adapted their processes to match.\n\nThe SAL read: if zero-day discovery is