#privilege-escalation

OpenAI says its autonomous vulnerability-research pipeline dynamically reproduced 1,724 Linux kernel vulnerabilities in a single October 2026 scan and generated 948 working local privilege-escalation \(LPE\) exploits that let an unprivileged local user obtain root, plus 291 information-leak proof-of-concepts. The company put total API cost at $1,213,430, or about $1,279 per successful LPE exploit, and cites roughly $359 as the lower marginal development cost; it also says at least 10 exploitation techniques were confirmed novel by third-party experts, including new cache-spraying objects, page grooming, data-only arbitrary-write escalation, and arbitrary type confusion. These figures are OpenAI&\x27;s own account, and the post does not say how many of the flaws were previously known, already patched, or reported upstream.