A new AI model has uncovered thousands of vulnerabilities in global software, raising urgent cybersecurity concerns as tech leaders scramble to prevent potential chaos.

Every now and again, a piece of tech news appears that affords a glimpse of a future which no one was expecting. Such a moment occurred last Tuesday, concerning AI and cybersecurity and the future of just about everything we rely on. It has set off an urgent new race between good guys and bad guys (as though we don't have enough of those). If the bad guys win, then there is going to be chaos at a scale that is hard to imagine.

If you think this is hyperbolic, I am going to try to convince you that it is not.

In 2003, a programmer somewhere added a few lines of code to a piece of software that now helps computers process video and is used billions of times a day -- if you have watched a video on the internet, streamed anything, used a media player, or edited a video in the last 20 years, there is a very good chance you have used this software.

The code added by the programmer was routine work, unremarkable, quickly forgotten. Over the next two decades, that code was examined by security experts, tested thousands of times by automated security tools,...