Find a Linux vulnerability hidden for 23 years
An account of Claude Code uncovering a long-standing vulnerability in Linux.
What they did
Nicholas Carlini, a research scientist at Anthropic, ran a short script that looped over every file in the Linux kernel source. For each file, it told Claude Code it was in a CTF, hinted the bug was in that file, and asked it to write its most serious finding to an output directory. Humans then had to validate the results.
How it went
Claude Opus 4.6 found several remotely exploitable kernel bugs, including an NFS heap overflow from 2003. Five fixed or reported vulnerabilities are listed. Older models found only a small fraction of these.
Worth knowing
Validating the findings by hand is the bottleneck: Carlini has several hundred unreviewed crashes. He won't send maintainers unverified reports, so most findings are still unreported.
Labels
ran a short script that looped over every file in the Linux kernel source
For each file, it told Claude Code it was in a CTF, hinted the bug was in that file, and asked it to write its most serious finding to an output directory.
He won't send maintainers unverified reports, so most findings are still unreported.
Claude Opus 4.6 found several remotely exploitable kernel bugs, including an NFS heap overflow from 2003.
Nicholas Carlini, a research scientist at Anthropic, ran a short script that looped over every file in the Linux kernel source. For each file, it told Claude Code it was in a CTF, hinted the bug was in that file, and asked it to write its most serious finding to an output directory.
The “Material” label failed its quality check and is not used for selection.
Details
- Agents
- Claude Code
- Source
- Hacker News
- Source date
- Apr 3, 2026
- Accounts
- 1
- In registry since
- Oct 12, 2026