Will AI expose the rickety infrastructure of the internet?

A startling announcement went out earlier this week: Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites — or if they couldn’t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe.

On this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether we’ll see more incidents like this in the future.

Sean called this “a real reckoning moment” that highlights how “when you get down to the bone level of the internet,” everything seems to be “held together by glue and dreams.” And with widespread access to large language models and AI agents, it’s only going to become easier to find these vulnerabilities. (That said, these specific vulnerabilities were found by human researchers, not AI models.)

Kirsten, meanwhile, wondered if we’re about to see the “next level of prepper doom […] because you could see how banks could get exploited, and [with] data and privacy concerns, it just feels a lot bigger than we can fix right now.”

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean: The internet is breaking in lots of ways this week, it seems. 

I think the best way to think about this, if people are coming into this kind of cold: How many times over the last 10 years have we had these moments where something breaks or something nearly breaks, where one person maintaining one tiny repro repository as a hobby or whatever happens to catch that something nefarious is going on and saves us from the infrastructure of the internet completely crumbling? 

Now multiply that by a billion, when people have access to not only extremely advanced software in the form of these LLMs that everybody uses, but also the ability to task them to go out and do it themselves, with creating AI agents that are single-minded at accomplishing those things.