Zhou Hongyi Warns AI Tools Are Industrializing Vulnerability Discovery

At the Fourth Cyberspace Security Forum held in Tianjin on September 2, 360 founder Zhou Hongyi warned that vulnerability discovery is moving from manual craftsmanship to industrialized production. He noted that AI tools are compressing the time required to find high-value flaws from months or even years down to just a few hours, giving attackers a decisive advantage in automation capacity.

Security teams already feel the pressure. Emergency response groups are frequently awakened at 2 a.m. by newly disclosed zero-days already being exploited in the wild. Analysts must quickly assess how many assets remain exposed and whether patches can be deployed before the next business peak. The pace has accelerated so rapidly that defenders barely finish one remediation cycle before the next weaponized exploit appears on dark-web forums.

Zhou Hongyi described the change as the end of the "handicraft workshop" era. Previously, finding a critical vulnerability required senior researchers to spend months analyzing millions of lines of code and running prolonged fuzzing campaigns with uncertain results. This natural limit kept high-value zero-day output relatively manageable for defenders.

The situation has shifted with the arrival of tools such as Mythos. 360’s own Tulongfeng platform, released in June, has already identified more than 10,000 vulnerabilities, 212 of which received authoritative verification. Among them are long-undiscovered high-risk flaws in Windows and Office, as well as issues in intelligent-agent platforms including OpenClaw, Flowise, and Codex. These numbers demonstrate that vulnerability mining has achieved genuine economies of scale for the first time.

Even more concerning, Zhou Hongyi introduced the concept of the "second one-way transparency." Offensive experience once accumulated over a decade by elite red-team operators—bypass techniques, lateral-movement intuition, and internal-network tradecraft—can now be distilled into prompts, toolchains, and automated playbooks. These can be loaded into AI agents, allowing novice attackers to replicate sophisticated operations previously reserved for experts. Attack volume and depth are now limited primarily by compute resources rather than the number of skilled humans.

Intelligent agents themselves are becoming a new attack surface. Many organizations are deploying AI agents for operations, customer service, and data analysis, granting them database access, API calls, and file-system permissions. A single prompt-injection or supply-chain compromise can turn an agent into an autonomous insider that collaborates with other agents, dramatically accelerating lateral movement.

Zhou Hongyi advocated a "model-versus-model" defense strategy. 360’s Yitianzhen system uses swarms of security agents to perform continuous threat detection, validation, coordinated response, and remediation. For frontline teams, he recommended three immediate actions: automate vulnerability-intelligence workflows with SOAR platforms so humans only make final decisions; inventory and regularly audit permissions granted to every internal AI agent, including logging and kill-switch mechanisms; and begin using AI assistance for code review and detection-rule creation to close the efficiency gap with attackers.

The conclusion is direct: AI will not replace security engineers, but attackers who use AI will replace defenders who do not. Vulnerability industrialization has begun, and defensive automation must move from slideware to operational reality measured in hours rather than days.