How to verify AI-discovered vulnerabilities aren't just training data echoes
The setup
Last month a friend DM'd me a screenshot. An AI security agent had "discovered" a vulnerability in a popular open-source project. The agent walked through exploitation steps, suggested a patch, the whole nine yards. Looked legit.
Then someo...
alan-west.hashnode.dev5 min read
This is an important distinction that I think will become a standard part of AI-assisted security workflows. A model identifying a vulnerability and a model recognizing a previously disclosed vulnerability can produce nearly identical outputs, but they represent completely different levels of value. The anonymization/redaction test is especially interesting because it forces us to ask whether the finding survives without the contextual clues that could trigger recall. More broadly, treating AI findings as leads that require verification not conclusions feels very similar to how mature teams already handle static analysis and automated security tooling. Confidence is not evidence; reproducibility is.