Microsoft's AI vulnerability detection results in record-breaking Pat…

It's not always interesting, but it's important to stay on top of operating system updates. However, if you're on Windows, you're definitely gonna want to prick up your ears for Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday. game-sweetbonanza.com

This might be Microsoft's biggest Patch Tuesday to date, addressing a whopping 974 security flaws found across both Windows 10 and Windows 11. Bleeping Computer offers a handy breakdown, reporting that 438 of these flaws were elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, 258 were remote code execution vulnerabilities, and 19 were security feature bypass vulnerabilities.

Perhaps more importantly, this Patch Tuesday also targets two actively exploited zero-days. Specifically, these are CVE-2026-85880 and CVE-2026-81963, which had both been leveraged previously to give attackers elevated system privileges.

Microsoft began leveraging AI vulnerability detection back in July, stressing back then that only the highest-confidence findings would ever reach the engineering team for fixing. As a result, July enjoyed a similarly record-breaking Patch Tuesday, stamping out 622 security vulnerabilities.

There's been a lot of praise for AI bug-hunting tools in recent months, with the CTO of Firefox raving about how an early version of Claude Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in the browser back in April. Anthropic itself was only too keen to toot its own horn that same month, saying that its AI had in fact found "thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser."

Now, compare and contrast this to, say, all the times OpenAI's agents have reportedly breached containment in recent months. For instance, there was the 'wiki incident', where AI agents took over a communally editable German website, and then there was also the 'Hugging Face incident'. OpenAI has been taking steps to learn from these incidents.

But to bring it back to Microsoft, the Edge team recently implemented an automated browser extension review system to better deal with the tidal wave of "AI-assisted" submissions. It's currently unclear if the automated system also uses AI or machine-learning (via The Register).

It's an odd state of affairs when AI is both the source of a major security incident and core to the tools engineers now use to address vulnerabilities. Obviously, agentic AI is a bit different to the tools Microsoft is using, but here's hoping this latter AI tech continues to be more of a help than a hindrance.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has conquered the box office this summer, and looks set to finish its theatrical run as the highest-grossing movie ever in the US. But despite the movie's extraordinary success, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO and Chairman Ravi Ahuja claims he doesn't yet know when Spider-Man 5 will swing into cinemas.

Speaking at a conference in New York, as reported by Variety, Ahuja discussed Brand New Day's record-breaking success at the box office – the extent of which was a surprise even to those at Sony. "We obviously hadn’t forecast that," Ahuja said. "We thought it would do incredibly well, but we didn’t know that would do that well."

It's fair to say most pundits expected Brand New Day to perform admirably at the box office, but the results have topped even the most optimistic forecasts, particularly given the recent superhero downswing and the fact that No Way Home featured three times as many Spider-Men; Brand New Day, comparatively, was far less of an event. Perhaps people were really curious about the identity of Sadie Sink's mystery character after all.

Ahuja has a theory about how and why Brand New Day massively overachieved. "The movie itself is very emotional… So a little bit different to what some of the more recent superhero movies have been. Still very much a superhero movie – there are a lot of big action scenes. It’s a lot of fun. But it’s emotional. Some people come away crying, so that is something clearly that resonated with the audience."

As for when we'll see Spider-Man 5, Ahuja, unsurprisingly, didn't have a straight answer, confirming only what we already know: that the movie is currently undated. "We don’t have a date for it yet. A couple years usually, but there’s a Spider-Verse movie [Beyond the Spider-Verse] coming next year.” Ahuja's not wrong that it's "usually" been a couple of years between mainline Tom Holland Spider-Man movies; the home trilogy released on that schedule between 2017 and 2021. There was a five-year gap between No Way Home and Brand New Day, but hopefully the wait won't be quite as protracted this time round.

Absence clearly made the hearts of audiences grow fonder, however, as Brand New Day looks set to end its theatrical run as the third-highest-grossing movie ever, having recently swung past Avatar: The Way of Water on the all-time totals. It's also on track to pass Star Wars: The Force Awakens' domestic record, which has held firm for over a decade; unbeaten even by Avengers: Endgame.

Whether the next Marvel movie, Avengers: Doomsday, can come close to Brand New Day's record-smashing success remains to be seen. Though given Doomsday has already made over $40m on pre-sales alone with around 100 days till release, it's on track to do very well indeed.

For more, check out our Spider-Man: Brand New Day review, our Spider-Man: Brand New Day ending explained, and our guide on how to watch Marvel movies in order.