Facepalm: GLM-5.3, the big language mannequin from Chinese language AI firm Z.ai, not too long ago helped uncover greater than 1,000 essential vulnerabilities throughout main open-source initiatives, together with the Linux kernel, including to the 1000’s extra flagged by different AI methods this 12 months. That torrent of AI-detected bugs is now pushing the variety of CVEs mounted per Linux kernel launch to just about 2,000, up from roughly 500 per launch for a number of years operating.
Forward of this month’s Kernel Recipes 2026 occasion in Paris, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman shared a graph charting the steep rise in CVEs discovered within the kernel over the previous a number of secure releases. The slide reveals that between variations 6.9 and 6.19, safety researchers noticed round 500 vulnerabilities per launch, on common.
From Linux 7.0 onward, that quantity jumped to round 1,000 CVEs per launch, and Linux 7.2 pushed it previous 1,500. A lot of the bugs in current releases have been caught by AI code evaluate platforms and enormous language fashions, and the depend may climb above 2,000 with Linux 7.3 as frontier AI methods preserve getting extra succesful.
At first look, 2,000 CVEs within the Linux kernel sounds alarming, on condition that the overwhelming majority of client, business, and industrial IoT gadgets run on Linux-based platforms, straight or not directly. Worryingly, the kernel’s supply tree runs to round 40 million strains of code, which means there are seemingly nonetheless 1000’s extra vulnerabilities ready to be discovered.
Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of documented CVEs are both low-priority or have an effect on out of date drivers and long-deprecated options.
The rise in AI-driven bug studies has had a silver lining for the kernel codebase too: earlier this 12 months, maintainers cleared out a batch of outdated drivers, together with your entire ISDN subsystem, that had been harboring dozens of CVEs.
Linus Torvalds flagged the issue in his Linux 7.1-rc4 launch publish this previous Might, warning that the kernel’s non-public safety mailing checklist had develop into “nearly totally unmanageable.” Kernel maintainers have mentioned report quantity has climbed from round 2-3 per week two years in the past to 5-10 day by day in 2026.
