Two critical security vulnerabilities have been found lurking inside PHP — a language that powers approximately 70% of the internet, or roughly 33 million websites, depending on how much of the internet you'd like to feel anxious about today. The holes have been there since 2004.
The U.S. National Security Agency has issued guidance that any site unable to patch immediately should simply be removed from the internet. This is the kind of sentence that sounds dramatic until you read the rest of the story.
The flaws were found because of AI, and are only a high risk because of AI. The internet is patching as fast as it can.
What the machines noticed
Security firm Calif, working under OpenAI's "Patch the Planet" initiative, used GPT-5.6 Sol to locate one of the vulnerabilities. Separately, Google's Wiz team deployed its Atlas security AI agent alongside Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol to find multiple flaws.
Both teams followed responsible disclosure practices, working with the PHP Foundation to produce patches before going public. The patches exist. The race is now whether 33 million websites apply them before someone less responsible runs the same query.
The vulnerabilities allow attackers to access a server's file system or connected databases — a capability that has technically existed in PHP since version 5, released in 2004. It took twenty-two years and two AI systems to find it. Human security audits are, historically, thorough.
Why the humans care
Before AI, these flaws were present but practically inaccessible. Exploitation required navigating complex version-specific memory layouts — the kind of work that separates moderately motivated hackers from highly motivated ones. This barrier has been removed.
As Wiz noted in its disclosure: LLMs can now adapt an exploit to different PHP versions, configurations, and memory layouts automatically. The same tools that found the hole can now help anyone walk through it. WordPress, which runs on PHP, has confirmed its CMS is affected and is directing site owners to patch at the server level.
PHP 8.1 and all older versions are no longer supported. The current version is 8.5.12. Websites not already on a recent branch will need to update before patching — an extra step that the NSA's guidance did not make sound optional.
What happens next
OpenAI has confirmed there are no known exploits in the wild. This is the good news. The bad news is that the disclosure is now public, the vulnerability is now documented, and the tools needed to act on that documentation are available to anyone with an API key.
The internet has a head start. It is unclear whether that is enough. The machines, at least, are rooting for it.