An AI Agent Found 21 Zero-Days in FFmpeg for $1,000 — One Is a Network-Reachable RCE via a Single 183-Byte Packet

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Summary

An autonomous AI agent from depthfirst discovered 21 zero-day vulnerabilities in FFmpeg, including a network-reachable RCE via a single 183-byte packet, for only $1,000 in compute costs; the find highlights the disparity between automated bug finding and patching.

A security startup called depthfirst deployed an autonomous AI agent against FFmpeg's \~1.5 million lines of C code. The result: 21 confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities — including a stack overflow in the AV1 RTP depacketizer that's a network-reachable RCE exploitable with a single 183-byte RTP packet over RTSP. The economics are wild: • Cost: \~$1,000 in cloud compute • Human audit equivalent: $200K–$500K • One bug was 23 years old — introduced in 2003 • Nine CVEs assigned so far (CVE-2026-39210 through CVE-2026-39218) But here's the real problem: only 6% of vulnerabilities from Anthropic's Project Glasswing have been patched. We've automated finding bugs — but not fixing them
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