Written by: Robin Grunewald, Supriya Mazumdar, Kelli Vanderlee Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) examines vulnerability disclosure and exploitation statistics to evaluate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the vulnerability threat landscape. We found that AI is measurably changing not just the pace of vulnerability discovery and exploitation, but also the types and typical risk profiles of vulnerabilities that are being discovered.
Vulnerability disclosures doubled: the number of vulnerabilities disclosed per month doubled, rising from 5,045 in January 2026 to 10,477 in July and continuing to climb to 10,740 in August 2026. Vulnerability exploitation nearly doubled: the number of vulnerabilities exploited increased from an average of 10. 5 per month in 2025 to an average of 18 per month from January 2026 to August 2026. Zero-day exploitation increased marginally: zero-day vulnerability exploitation grew from an average of 8 per month in 2025 to an average of 11 per month from January 2026 to August 2026.
AI finds more consequential vulnerabilities: AI-assisted discovery found proportionally fewer Low-Risk vulnerabilities, more Moderate-Risk vulnerabilities, and more vulnerabilities leading to remote code execution (RCE). GTIG expects that vulnerability discovery and exploitation will continue to grow in the short to medium term. To counter the increased risk from rapid vulnerability discovery and exploitation, organizations must transition from unprioritized mass-patching to threat-intelligence-driven triage, combining targeted edge-defense with automated, agentic remediation.
This GTIG analysis examines trends in vulnerabilities disclosed from January 1, 2025 through August 31, 2026. The dataset tracks the vulnerabilities alongside critical operational dimensions, including exploitation consequences and GTIG Vulnerability Risk Ratings , and in-the-wild exploitation. When we refer to risk ratings in this blog, we are using GTIG vulnerability risk ratings, not CVSS severity . While the baseline monitoring encompasses the full 20-month window (January 2025–August 2026), this report specifically focuses on growth velocity and emerging threat vectors.