TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8

Discussion overview

The AI angle drew a more measured reaction than the alarmist framing around a critical kernel bug. One practitioner reported that AI is already genuinely useful for static vulnerability hunting in firmware binaries: it can surface suspicious code paths faster than manual review. But that usefulness stopped well short of autonomous compromise. When asked to turn findings into root access, the tool reportedly wandered because a use-after-free is not automatically an exploit; practical exploitation often needs heap control, information disclosure, reliable read/write primitives, and defenses such as ASLR to be overcome. The thread treated that gap as an important reality check on claims of push-button offensive AI.

Several commenters also pushed back on the idea that AI itself created this vulnerability wave. Their view was that AI may accelerate discovery of long-buried flaws, producing an exhausting spike in disclosures without changing the fact that the bugs already existed. That could eventually improve the security baseline, provided operators survive the patching burden and adopt containment-minded designs. The mood was wary rather than triumphalist: AI-assisted discovery can expose dangerous defects faster, but exploit development remains target-specific and technically demanding.

Points of disagreement

The sharpest dispute was whether AI-driven vulnerability discovery is mainly a net security gain or the beginning of an unmanageable defensive crisis. Optimists argued that faster discovery flushes out old defects and ultimately hardens systems; skeptics accepted that premise but stressed that organizations may face overwhelming remediation pressure before those benefits arrive.