Apple Security Team Overwhelmed as AI Bug Hunting Outpaces Human Review

Apple struggles to keep pace with AI 'bug' hunters

Apple has restricted the number of potentially dangerous software bugs researchers can submit to its internal security team, as it faces a deluge of reports from people using AI models to identify alleged risks. The Cupertino-based tech giant told the FT it had moved in June to limit the high volume of requests it was receiving, with its review system coming under pressure from "AI slop" reports that can hallucinate security risks in its software. Apple is grappling with an industry-wide phenomenon that has resulted in generative AI software tools transforming the cyber security arms race, with an increase in the detection of real security flaws and a wave of poor-quality submissions from amateur bug hunters using AI, the company said. The change in Apple's approach was highlighted by Italian cyber security start-up Bynario, which told the FT it had used OpenAI's ChatGPT to identify more than 50 bugs in the latest version of the MacBook operating system in just three weeks. Among them was one of the most serious types of vulnerability, a so-called privilege escalation exploit chain, which could allow an attacker to seize full control of an Apple computer by gaining unrestricted access to the system. However, the start-up said it was unable to alert Apple to the vulnerability because the tech giant had limited the number of bug reports it could make. "It is a very difficult time in the industry," Bynario chief executive and co-founder Alfredo Pesoli said. "Maintainers and vendors have been flooded by the sheer amount of bugs [being found]." Apple told the FT that it was now in contact with Bynario and reviewing its submissions. The company has introduced a cap and a 30-day cool-off period on submissions through its internal security portal, requiring users to submit requests for an increased quota. Each alleged security breach requires human review to confirm, although Apple is also using AI internally to help triage the massive upsurge. "With the growing volume of AI-generated security submissions across the industry, we recently adjusted the number of new reports a researcher can have open at once," Apple said in a statement. Researchers "can easily request an increase to that limit at any time to ensure critical reports reach our security teams," the company continued. Bynario, a seven-person start-up founded in Milan last year, develops defensive cyber security software. Three of its other co-founders previously worked at Hacking Team, the Italian surveillance software company whose hacking tools were leaked in a 2015 cyber attack. In 2025, Bynario reported eight vulnerabilities to Apple, one of which was patched in a software update in November. This year it said it had reported five more, before Apple's system refused further submissions. The privilege escalation exploit Bynario was unable to report is the latest example of AI exposing weaknesses in Apple's security systems, despite the company's longstanding emphasis on privacy and device security. Last September Apple announced Memory Integrity Enforcement, a security feature designed to prevent memory corruption attacks, one of the most common ways hackers compromise software. The company described it as "the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems". Eight months later, researchers at Palo Alto-based Calif said they had found a way past the new security, having used Anthropic's Mythos to identify the first memory corruption exploit on the latest software. Unlike that attack, Bynario's exploit relied on so-called logic flaws, by manipulating trusted software into carrying out a sequence of otherwise legitimate actions in an unintended order. Pesoli estimated that an exploit of this type could fetch between $100,000 and $200,000 on the cybercriminal black market. Apple last year introduced a new bug bounty award mechanism that could pay out as much as $5mn for identifying the most serious and sophisticated category of threats to its software. Apple is also using AI to strengthen its software. In security updates released this week for its operating systems, the company credited tools from Anthropic and OpenAI with helping identify a number of vulnerabilities across its devices. The updates included around five times as many security fixes as previous release cycles, underlining how rapidly AI is reshaping both attack and defence in cyber security. The challenge for all software companies is that AI is having a "dual impact" on bug hunting, making it easier for amateur sleuths to submit speculative reports and for skilled researchers to find dangerous exploits, said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cyber security firm Sophos. "The result is that bug bounty programmes are shifting from a problem of finding vulnerabilities to a problem of validating, prioritising and responding to them at machine speed." Additional reporting by Stephen Morris in Diablo

AI is finding Apple security flaws faster than Apple can sort through them

Apple has limited how many bug reports researchers can keep open as AI tools produce both genuine Mac vulnerabilities and a flood of questionable submissions Apple has capped the number of security reports researchers can keep open at once after AI bug hunting put its review process under pressure, according to the Financial Times. Some submissions describe hallucinated or purely theoretical risks. Others uncover vulnerabilities serious enough to require patches. Bynario told the FT that it found more than 50 possible macOS flaws in three weeks, including a privilege-escalation chain that could give an attacker full control of a Mac. Recommended Videos Every report still needs human verification, although Apple is now using AI to help triage the backlog. Finding possible weaknesses is getting easier. Working out which ones pose an immediate threat has become the harder job. How real are the AI-found flaws Bynario has already shown that its system can produce more than automated guesswork. Its Atlas platform used GPT-5.5 to uncover a macOS Screen Sharing flaw that let an authenticated VNC viewer access protected data and create files with root privileges. The attack required Screen Sharing or Remote Management to be enabled, along with legacy VNC password access. Apple assigned it CVE-2026-43760 and patched it in macOS Tahoe 26.6. Bynario also demonstrated how the flaw could be extended to run commands as root. That gave Apple a working exploit to investigate rather than another vague warning generated from a code scan. Why Apple needs the same AI Apple's recent security advisories credit researchers working with Claude for a kernel vulnerability. OpenAI Codex Security has also helped identify several WebKit issues. AI-assisted research is already contributing to fixes shipped for macOS and Safari. Restricting submissions too aggressively could delay useful discoveries, while leaving the gates open risks burying Apple's team under convincing-looking nonsense. The bottleneck is verification. Models can generate possible attack paths quickly, but Apple still has to reproduce the behavior, confirm the required conditions and decide how urgently it needs a fix. Can Apple keep the signal Apple has redesigned its bug bounty program around stronger evidence. Its maximum payout now exceeds $5 million for the most serious exploit chains, while Target Flags help researchers prove that a flaw reaches protected parts of the system. That gives Apple a better way to separate demonstrated exploits from automated speculation. Mac users can't solve the reporting backlog, but they can limit their exposure by installing security updates promptly. AI bug hunting is already finding flaws that reach Apple's patch queue.