Will AI expose the rickety infrastructure of the internet?
TechCrunch discusses the fragility of internet infrastructure following recent vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language. Experts warn that the rise of AI agents could make it significantly easier for malicious actors to exploit these systemic weaknesses.
Why it matters
It highlights the growing risk that AI-driven automation poses to the foundational software that powers the global internet.
A startling announcement went out earlier this week: Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites — or if they couldn’t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe.
On this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast , Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether we’ll see more incidents like this in the future.
Sean called this “a real reckoning moment” that highlights how “when you get down to the bone level of the internet,” everything seems to be “held together by glue and dreams.” And with widespread access to large language models and AI agents, it’s only going to become easier to find these vulnerabilities. (That said, these specific vulnerabilities were found by human researchers , not AI models.)
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