Imagine being a kernel developer, knowing that AI is now discovering over 2,000 bugs for every release. On the kernel.org site, main developer Greg Kroah-Hartman shared a slide showing how the number of vulnerabilities has increased from kernel 6.9 to kernel 7.2.

At the end of the 6.9 development cycle, the kernel was seeing around 500 vulnerabilities discovered per release. After a dip under 500 for kernel 6.14, things mostly flatlined until kernel 7.0, which jumped to a staggering (roughly) 1,200 vulnerabilities. With the 7.2 release, the kernel has reached nearly 2,000 vulnerabilities.

To be clear, this isn't an increase in the number of vulnerabilities in the kernel; it's an increase in the number of vulnerabilities found. Some of these vulnerabilities could have been hiding for years and were only discovered because of AI’s speed. This should come as no surprise, given the Linux kernel contains over 40 million lines of code.

The real problem here is that kernel developers are then charged with fixing those vulnerabilities, and it's starting to become overwhelming.

"Due to AI/large language models (LLMs) generating more and more bug reports against all areas of the kernel," Michael Larabel of Phoronix reports,"– including drivers that haven't been touched in years or even decades and likely not seeing any real use by users on vintage hardware with the leading-edge upstream kernels – the networking subsystem is looking at gutting out that old code to eliminate the superfluous AI/LLM bug reports."

So it's important to keep in mind that sometimes AI finds a vulnerability in code that is no longer in use but hasn't been removed because of the added work involved.