On October 7, 2026, Microsoft’s FORGE Lab, writing on the Microsoft Security blog under Taesoo Kim, VP of Agentic Security, reported that from May through September 2026 its work helped discover Windows vulnerabilities assigned 140 CVEs, including 52 fixed in the September 2026 security release alone. The monthly counts were 16 in May, 10 in June, 27 in July, 35 in August and 52 in September. The work runs on MDASH, a multi-model agentic scanning harness that combines frontier and distilled models with specialized auditor agents and code-analysis tools.
Beyond Windows, FORGE submitted 155 internally validated reports across 23 open-source projects, including curl, Node.js, FFmpeg, SQLite, llama.cpp, vLLM and the Linux kernel; 93 reports across 14 projects had maintainer acknowledgement at the time of writing. In the Linux kernel, MDASH flagged thousands of suspicious locations and its validation agents produced supporting evidence for 627 findings. Across 182 confirmed kernel crash findings, generating a proof-of-concept averaged 3.61 dollars in model cost and 21.5 minutes; testing six selected cases for local privilege escalation with automatic exploit generation averaged 8.56 dollars and 25.4 minutes. One FORGE report was the first submission through the Linux Foundation’s Akrites disclosure initiative to result in a patch merged into the kernel.
Why it matters: it is a rare vendor-reported figure for AI agents finding bugs in a flagship commercial operating system at production scale, and it puts a price on validation: a few dollars of model time per confirmed kernel crash. Microsoft’s own lesson is that the bottleneck has moved from finding candidate bugs to building, reproducing and fixing them.
What it does not show: Microsoft says FORGE “helped discover” the 140 CVEs, so the share found by agents alone versus human researchers working with them is not broken out, and severity distribution for the Windows CVEs is not given. The cost figures cover only successful validation cases in a subset of the kernel work.