Will AI expose the rickety infrastructure of the internet?

A widespread vulnerability in the open-source programming language PHP forced website owners to patch or take down their sites, prompting a TechCrunch Equity podcast discussion on the internet's fragility. The panelists noted that PHP underpins roughly 70% of websites, including WordPress and Drupal. While this particular vulnerability was discovered by human researchers, they warned that widely available large language models and AI agents will make it far easier to find and exploit similar decades-old flaws. They described the internet as fundamentally held together by glue and dreams, and raised concerns about cascading link rot as smaller sites shut down instead of patching, escalating hack attempts, and the vast gap between well-resourced companies like Amazon and the many unprotected sites and government pages.

(Source：TechCrunch)