His warning follows this week's scramble to patch newly discovered vulnerabilities in PHP, the scripting language that by some estimates powers roughly 70% of the world's websites. The flaws prompted emergency maintenance that briefly pulled government sites, game marketplaces and other services offline, and raised the prospect of popular web destinations being turned into attack vectors.

Prince said Cloudflare is aware of "a bunch of additional severe vulnerabilities that are present in other pieces of critical software" like those behind the PHP panic. The bottleneck that once limited both defenders and attackers, a finite pool of experts with time to hunt for flaws, matters less when a person can direct a workforce of LLM agents at the problem.

Wiz Research, one of the firms that identified the recent PHP exploits with LLM assistance, wrote that "the economics of both discovery and exploitation" have changed, with frontier models helping it develop and adapt working exploits across multiple applications in hours. Prince added a longer-term silver lining: as the newly surfaced flaws get patched, the upheaval should ultimately leave software more secure.