Anthropic says an unreleased model built five working exploit chains, including a root shell on Linux over the network

CCybersecurity #AI-security #anthropic #chrome #exploit #linux-kernel #safari #vulnerability

Anthropic says an unreleased model built five working exploit chains, including a root shell on Linux over the network

Anthropic's post walks through each chain; The Hacker News checks which claims vendors' own records confirm and which rest on Anthropic's word.

In a research post on October 27, Anthropic said an unreleased internal model, after initial prompting and with little human involvement, found vulnerabilities in Chrome, Safari, Android, Windows and Linux and chained them into working proof-of-concept exploits. One opens the Calculator on a Mac running stock Chrome seconds after a page loads; another turns off Safari's same-origin policy so a page can read data from other sites. Anthropic says it reported everything to vendors first, and that 62 Chrome bugs got CVEs and were fixed by Chrome 156.

The Hacker News notes that Google and Apple credit Anthropic and Claude for specific fixes, but how much each chain needed from people can't be checked, and the Windows bug's public record names no finder.

The Linux chain gives a remote attacker a root shell on servers running a multipath TCP listener. Anthropic ties it to CVE-2026-98432, a race condition in the kernel's IPv4 TCP code that the kernel's CVE team rates 9.8 of 10. As of October 29, Debian, Oracle, SUSE and Amazon Linux had shipped fixed kernels; Ubuntu and Red Hat had not, and Red Hat rated the flaw lower.

Read it at the source

AnthropicDiscovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in critical, real-world software with Claude \ Anthropic ↗ The Hacker NewsAnthropic's Unreleased AI Model Chains Flaws Into Working Chrome, Safari, Windows and Linux Exploits Independent ↗ The Hacker NewsLinux Kernel TCP Flaw With 9.8 CVSS Score Affects Ubuntu, Red Hat and Other Distributions Independent ↗

Cascadic Analysis 2

UndertowAutonomous cyber capability scales attackers enormously

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

Anthropic's own framing is the point: exploit chains like these once took specialist teams, and its model built them after initial prompting with little human involvement, on a platform that runs many scanning agents in parallel. This time the work went to vendors first under a 90-day disclosure policy, and 62 Chrome bugs were fixed. The same kind of capability is not limited to labs that disclose responsibly, which is why Anthropic tells everyone to scan their own code.

UndertowDelayed Consequence / False Success Problem

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

"Patched upstream" is not the same as "patched on your server." As of October 29, Debian, Oracle, SUSE and Amazon Linux had shipped fixed kernels for the 9.8-rated multipath TCP flaw, while Ubuntu and Red Hat had not, and Red Hat rated it lower. When AI finds bugs faster than distributions and admins can roll out fixes, the announcement can make a problem look solved weeks before the machines that matter are actually safe.

Rabbit Holes 2

Race condition

After exploring Linux Kernel TCP Flaw With 9.8 CVSS Score Affects Ubuntu, Red Hat and Other Distributions, the kind of timing bug at the heart of the Linux chain is explained in Race condition.

Explains race conditions: bugs where a system's behavior depends on the uncontrolled timing of events, the class of flaw behind the Linux chain.

Wikipedia · Wade · 5 min

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Multipath TCP

After exploring Linux Kernel TCP Flaw With 9.8 CVSS Score Affects Ubuntu, Red Hat and Other Distributions, the networking feature the exploit needs is described in Multipath TCP.

Multipath TCP is an IETF effort to let a single TCP connection use several network paths at once for throughput and redundancy.

Wikipedia · Wade · 5 min

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Anthropic says an unreleased model built five working exploit chains, including a root shell on Linux over the network

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