“AI Is About To Break Everything”. “AI broke the internet” [1]. Really?!

These headlines grabbed attention when researchers at Wiz used AI to uncover critical flaws (CVSS up to 9.2) in core PHP. Roughly 70% of websites affected. Bugs that had been sitting in the codebase for over a decade. As one of their researchers pointed out, with AI, a single researcher did in a week what a world-class team would have needed months to complete [2].

Overblown headlines are now the norm; they distract us from seeing what is actually happening, as I pointed out in my earlier argument, “AI on AI Part I: Overblown Headlines” [3].

In my view, the real concern is that complexity is no longer a reliable barrier. That is the real shift in economics. The question is where this goes when attackers reach the same leverage. Check my argument in “AI on AI Part III: Convergence” [4].

AI does not need to be autonomous to change the threat equation. The danger is not AI acting alone. It is what people can do with it. The same mechanism appears elsewhere, as I noted in “AI can now design working viruses” [5].

On the brighter side, I think, rather than asking, “did AI hack it on its own?”, perhaps we should see how it is making humans more capable. In this PHP case, the humans at Wiz were defenders. They coordinated with The PHP Foundation and other teams. The patch is out.

Sources

[1] “AI Is About To Break Everything”, TheAIGRID: https://youtu.be/7yFSH4VChUw
[2] Wiz Research technical write-up: https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
[3] “AI on AI Part I: Overblown Headlines Likely to Spook Insurers”: https://greyorbits.com/ai-on-ai-overblown-headlines-spook-insurers/
[4] “AI on AI Part III: Convergence”: https://greyorbits.com/ai-on-ai-part-iii-convergence/
[5] “AI can now design working viruses”: https://greyorbits.com/ai-design-viruses/

About the Author

Viren Mantri is the founder of Grey Orbits in Singapore, a Senior Instructor at Quantum Academy, and an Executive Faculty member at Singapore Management University Executive Development. Three decades across Standard Chartered, SC Ventures, UBS, McAfee, and KPMG inform his advisory work on AI, digital currencies, and quantum readiness. He authored the PETALS™ Framework for AI Governance, the Cybersecurity Model for Startups, and the Framework for Cyber Insurance.

© 2026 Viren Mantri, Grey Orbits. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Disclaimer: All views expressed here are entirely mine.