Cloudflare CEO Says AI Will Break the Internet Weekly for Two Years

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Reuters to expect a couple of years of weekly security panics, days after AI-assisted research into PHP pulled GOG offline.

The flaws that caused the scramble sit in PHP itself, not in any site built on top of it, and PHP runs 69.3% of the websites whose server-side language is known. Prince says his company already knows about more severe holes in other critical software. The part that changed this week is how fast anyone can turn a hole into a working attack.

Wiz Research published the findings on 21 October under the name PHP2Shell, grouped into two CVEs with severity reaching CVSS 9.2. Every PHP release of the past decade is affected by at least one of them, going back to version 5.4. The bugs are memory-safety issues in how the engine handles fatal errors, and they let an unauthenticated attacker read process memory or run code on the server. The memory in question can hold passwords, authentication tokens, API keys and certificates belonging to other requests. The research team demonstrated pre-authentication remote code execution against current WordPress, Drupal and Joomla containers, and made the point that the choice of software was arbitrary, since a plain hello-world page on an affected PHP version is exposed the same way. The PHP team shipped the patch the same day.

The vulnerable code had been sitting there for over ten years without anyone turning it into a usable exploit. Building one meant chaining several bugs and adapting to how each target lays out memory, which is the kind of slow, specialist work that used to keep flaws theoretical.

“Frontier models were critical to making this process practical, enabling us to develop and adapt working exploits across multiple applications in hours.”

— Wiz Research

Wiz named the models it used, with Gemini 4 Argon credited for contributions to discovery, exploit development and patch validation, and Raluca Ada Popa of Google DeepMind framing the result as frontier AI closing a gap defenders had lived with for a decade. The same mechanism works for anyone on the other side. Prince’s argument to Reuters is that the ceiling on vulnerability discovery used to be the number of experts willing to spend months on it, and that ceiling is gone.

“I think we’re going to have a couple years where every single week it’s going to feel like the sky is falling.”

— Matthew Prince

Cloudflare sits in front of 86.0% of the websites that use a reverse proxy, which works out to 27.9% of the web, and that list includes Epicgames.com, Spotify, Shopify and X. It is also six months into its own restructuring around AI, having cut 1,100 employees by email in May, around 20% of the company, with Prince’s memo describing a move into the era of AI agents rather than a cost cut. Internal AI usage at the company had risen more than 600% over the previous three months. The man forecasting two years of AI-driven breakage runs a company that bet its headcount on the same technology.

GOG announced at 8am Pacific that its store and GOG Galaxy would be down for a couple of hours of maintenance, did not name the reason, and came back roughly four hours later with a line about the one thing an outage cannot touch.

“Your DRM-free library is right where you left it.”

— GOG

Final Fantasy 14 login servers went down in the same window, and the government of Finland pulled websites as a precaution. None of those services had to be running vulnerable code for the decision to make sense; patching a language used by two-thirds of the web is faster with the lights off.

I care more about the version split than about the patch date. PHP 8 covers 65.4% of PHP sites, which leaves 26.8% on version 7 and 7.7% still on version 5, and those are the hosts least likely to have anyone reading a disclosure blog on a Wednesday. A patch released on 21 October only protects the servers that take it, and the rest stay open for as long as nobody touches them.

The AI argument the games industry has been having all month is about a different machine. Masahiro Sakurai said this week that generative tools will push Steam past the 19,000 games it has taken this year, up from 275 in 2010, and that most of what arrives will be unprofitable copies of systems other games already use. His worry is a storefront nobody can read through. The PHP disclosure is the same capability pointed at infrastructure, where output volume is not the problem and a single working chain is.

Epic Games announced its AI MegaJam for 12 November, with $7,500 for each first-place category winner and continuation grants of up to $50,000, then quietly deleted the FAQ line telling entrants they had to use AI at all. Epicgames.com is on the list of sites sitting behind the proxy layer Prince runs, which is the part of the stack that absorbed this week rather than the part running the jam.

Xbox senior business strategy manager Brandon Stirrup made the strongest version of the maker claim on 18 October, posting that anyone can build a game with AI off the back of a two-day prototype with about three hours of work in it, and then deleted his account inside a day. I find the maker argument less interesting this week than the breaker one, because a jam prize and a deleted thread are opinions, and a CVSS 9.2 in the language under most of the web is a demonstration.

Prince does expect the cycle to end somewhere useful. His position is that the flaws being surfaced now get patched, and that software comes out of the next two years more secure than it went in. That is a long-term claim attached to a short-term instruction, which is to keep browsers and clients current and treat the next few months of outage notices as routine. I would rather have boring patch cycles than a cleaner codebase in 2028, and the forecast on offer is the second one.

Cloudflare has not said which other pieces of critical software it is watching. Wiz has said the PHP variants it reported are not the only ones in the codebase, though the October patch closes the class at its root.