AI bug finding in cryptography and ZK: timeline of tools, results and incidents (2025-2026)
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Dated milestones in AI-powered security auditing: the DARPA AIxCC final, frontier-lab scanner launches, AI-found CVEs in OpenSSL, OpenSSH, wolfSSL and the Linux kernel, the OpenVM zkVM soundness bug found by zkao, benchmark releases and the curl bounty shutdown.

2026-09-07: zkSecurity: the year finding and exploiting bugs became cheap — Argues for layered continuous security; counts crypto hacks rising from 16 in January to 50 in August 2026. (https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/the-year-finding-bugs-became-cheap/)
2026-08-22: AI Grinding for cryptanalysis paper — Agent-generated hypotheses tested by exact computation; claims reproducible failures in eight published constructions. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21986)
2026-08-21: Claude Security available to enterprises on Claude Mythos 5 — Billed as standard token usage. (https://claude.com/blog/bringing-claude-mythos-5-to-more-defenders)
2026-08-20: Ethereum Foundation, Yukon and zkSecurity launch better.codes — AI agents raise a Lean-checked soundness bound; the kernel judges every submission. (https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/08/20/better-codes-challenge)
2026-08-15: AISLE reports six curl CVEs after Mythos and Codex Security found none — Low-severity issues fixed in curl 8.22.0. (https://aisle.com/blog/aisle-discovered-six-curl-cves-after-openai-and-anthropic-found-zero)
2026-08-05: zkSecurity releases zk-skills and circom-auditor — 66 of 70 on zkbugs direct mode; 40 of 56 on full codebases. (https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/circom-auditor/)
2026-07-24: zkao 2.0: prepaid credits, collaborative agents, triage tooling — Subscriptions replaced by non-expiring credits with per-scan caps. (https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/zkao-2-0/)
2026-07-22: zkao finds four zero-days in Bron Labs bron-crypto — Dual-agent auditor and validator pipeline; all four fixed via bounty. (https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/bron-bugs/)
2026-07-21: Google releases Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber and CodeMender preview — 55 confirmed V8 issues; access gated. (https://deepmind.google/blog/introducing-gemini-3-5-flash-cyber/)
2026-07-17: zkao finds critical OpenVM soundness bug CVE-2026-46669 — Missing subfield check in the pairing guest library let a prover forge pairing equalities; fixed in OpenVM 1.6.0. (https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/openvm-bugs/)
2026-07-07: zkao and zkSecurity report seven bugs in Cloudflare CIRCL — Six bounties awarded; severities mis-rated by the AI in both directions. (https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/circl-bugs/)
2026-06-15: OpenSSL patches high-severity PKCS#7 use-after-free found with AI — CVE-2026-45447, alongside about six flaws credited to an Anthropic researcher. (https://www.securityweek.com/openssl-patches-high-severity-vulnerability-found-with-ai/)
2026-05-22: Anthropic publishes Project Glasswing initial update — More than 10,000 high or critical findings, 530 disclosed, including wolfSSL CVE-2026-5194. (https://www.anthropic.com/research/glasswing-initial-update)
2026-04-29: Linux 'Copy Fail' CVE-2026-31431 in the AF_ALG crypto interface — Deterministic root exploit found in about an hour by an AI-assisted scan. (https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/cve-2026-31431-copy-fail/)
2026-04-29: Nethermind publishes AuditAgent results on EVMbench — 67 percent post-validation recall versus 47 percent for Claude Opus 4.6. (https://www.nethermind.io/blog/auditagent-on-evmbench-what-the-data-shows)
2026-03-31: Trail of Bits describes its AI-native practice — About 20 percent of reported bugs first surfaced by AI, all human-validated. (https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/03/31/how-we-made-trail-of-bits-ai-native-so-far/)
2026-03-06: OpenAI releases Codex Security research preview — 1.2 million commits and 14 CVEs in thirty days. (https://openai.com/index/codex-security-now-in-research-preview/)
2026-03-02: OpenZeppelin audits EVMbench — Invalid high-severity items and contamination risk identified. (https://www.openzeppelin.com/news/openai-evmbench-audit)
2026-02-20: Anthropic launches Claude Code Security research preview — Claims 500 vulnerabilities found in production open source. (https://anthropic.com/news/claude-code-security)
2026-02-18: OpenAI and Paradigm release EVMbench — 117 vulnerabilities from 40 audits. (https://openai.com/index/introducing-evmbench/)
2026-02-07: zkSecurity launches zkao — AI bug detection for cryptography code, Circom first. (https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/zkao-launch/)
2026-01-31: curl ends its bug bounty over AI-generated reports — Confirmed-report rates had fallen below five percent. (https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-bug-bounty/)
2026-01-27: AISLE credited with 12 of 12 OpenSSL CVEs — Three bugs dated to 1998 to 2000. (https://aisle.com/blog/aisle-discovered-12-out-of-12-openssl-vulnerabilities)
2025-10-01: Nethermind publishes AuditAgent recall on 29 real audits — 30 percent average recall; 42 percent of criticals. (https://www.nethermind.io/blog/how-nethermind-security-uses-auditagent-alongside-manual-audits)
2025-09-25: Zellic introduces V12 — LLM plus static analysis for Solidity. (https://www.zellic.io/blog/introducing-v12/)
2025-08-08: DARPA AIxCC final results — 54 million lines scanned, 18 real zero-days, 43 of 54 synthetic bugs patched; Team Atlanta, Trail of Bits, Theori on the podium. (https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/aixcc-results)
2025-06-18: Zero Knowledge Podcast: AI and ZK auditing with David Wong — Early public discussion of zkSecurity's AI auditing approach. (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com/p/ai-and-zk-auditing-with-with-david)

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Last reviewed: 2026-09-13