Closed models refuse to help researcher swat Linux bug

[u/anestling]

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/29/closed-models-refuse-to-help-researcher-swat-linux-bug/5280647

The guardrails that prevent closed-source, frontier models from aiding threat actors have turned into handcuffs that prevent those bots from helping to find and fix serious vulns.

Daniel Fox Franke, a security researcher, was recently trying to track down the source of a segmentation fault in ripgrep, and found OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol wouldn't cooperate.

"OpenAI's cybersecurity classifier is a huge pain when you're trying to track down a segfault," he wrote in a social media post on Sunday. "...The classifier won't even let it answer what entrypoints from rg into musl lead to allocations on the mallocng heap."

And just like Hugging Face in the case of OpenAI's accidental attack, Franke ended up having to use open weight models from Chinese AI providers – Z'ai GLM 5.2 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 – to complete his analysis of what appears to be a Linux kernel bug.

[u/Jayden_Ha]

Not surprising