AI-Assisted Security Research: A Researcher Found a $500K WordPress RCE with GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra for $25

Security researcher Adam Kues of Assetnote (part of Searchlight Cyber) published a detailed account of how he used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra and a multi-agent prompting strategy to discover a critical pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress core — a class of finding exploit brokers value at $500,000 — for just $25 in API costs and roughly 10 hours of work.

This isn’t a story about autonomous AI hacking. Kues directed the research. GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra was his tool. But the implication is clear: the economics of high-value vulnerability research just shifted dramatically.

The Vulnerability: wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030 + CVE-2026-60137)

The disclosure, dubbed wp2shell, chains two separate WordPress core flaws to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on default installations.

CVE-2026-63030 — discovered by Kues — is a REST API batch-route confusion bug. The WordPress REST API allows batching multiple requests in a single call, and Kues identified a logic flaw in how the batch router processes routes: an unauthenticated attacker can craft a batch request that confuses the routing layer into bypassing authentication checks on internal-facing endpoints.

CVE-2026-60137 — a SQL injection flaw in WordPress core’s WP_Query via the author__not_in parameter — is chained as the second stage. Once the batch-route confusion bypasses authentication, CVE-2026-60137 enables SQL injection, ultimately leading to unauthenticated shell access.

Affected versions: WordPress 6.9.0–6.9.4 and 7.0.0–7.0.1.

Patch status: WordPress issued emergency patches 6.9.5 and 7.0.2 on July 17, 2026, with forced automatic updates enabled. If you’re running a self-managed WordPress install with auto-updates disabled, you need to update manually — right now. SecurityWeek has confirmed in-the-wild exploitation is already occurring.

How GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra Contributed

Kues’s research methodology is where this story gets genuinely interesting for the agentic AI community. Rather than manually auditing WordPress core source code — a months-long process for a complex, multi-component codebase — Kues built a multi-agent prompting pipeline using GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra.

The approach involved:

  • Feeding large sections of WordPress core PHP source code to the model for analysis
  • Prompting the model to identify candidate paths for authentication bypasses and input handling issues
  • Using iterative follow-up prompting to narrow high-confidence candidates
  • Performing manual verification only on the narrowed candidate set

GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra’s extended context window and reasoning capability let Kues process far more code surface than would be practical manually. The SQL injection vector (CVE-2026-60137) was identified through model analysis of WP_Query parameter handling — a component that’s well-understood in isolation but had a subtle injection path in its author__not_in implementation.

Total cost: ~$25 in OpenAI API spend. Total elapsed time: ~10 hours of directed research.

To be clear: a human expert directed, verified, and disclosed this research. GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra didn’t autonomously find and weaponize this vulnerability. But it dramatically compressed the analysis phase — what might have taken weeks of manual review became a 10-hour directed sprint.

What This Means for the Security Landscape

The implications here cut both ways, and the security community is actively debating them.

For defenders: AI-assisted vulnerability research can dramatically accelerate the cadence of responsible disclosure. Security teams that adopt these tools can audit more surface area, faster. This is a genuine capability multiplier for understaffed security teams facing sprawling attack surfaces.

For the economics of bug bounty: If a $500,000-class vulnerability can be found for $25 in API costs, the economic calculus of who can afford high-value vulnerability research is changing. This historically required senior researchers with deep domain expertise and months of time — both expensive. The expertise is still required (Kues knew WordPress architecture), but the time cost collapsed.

For the threat model: The same capability available to Adam Kues is available to threat actors. If security researchers can use frontier LLMs to accelerate vulnerability discovery, so can offensive actors. The question isn’t whether this happens — it’s how fast the defensive side keeps pace.

WordPress Site Operators: What to Do Now

  1. Verify your WordPress version immediately — you need 6.9.5 or 7.0.2 (or any later version)
  2. Check for auto-update settings — if auto-updates are disabled, update manually via admin dashboard or WP-CLI
  3. Check your WAF rules — if patching is delayed, consider blocking REST API batch endpoint (/wp-json/batch/v1) at the WAF layer as a temporary mitigation
  4. Review plugin and theme update policies — CVE-2026-60137 is in core, not a plugin; the patch is in the core update

The Broader Trend

wp2shell sits at the intersection of two accelerating trends in the AI and security space: frontier models becoming genuinely useful for technical research, and security vulnerabilities in widely-deployed software becoming harder to find through conventional means. Adam Kues’s work is a public, well-documented data point that will almost certainly inspire more AI-assisted security research — from both the white-hat and grey-hat communities.

The $25 price point will be the number everyone remembers. The 10-hour timeline is the number security teams should be thinking about.

Sources

  1. Adam Kues / Searchlight Cyber: Exploit brokers pay $500,000 for a WordPress RCE. I found one with GPT5.6 Sol Ultra and $25
  2. The Hacker News: New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code
  3. CybersecurityNews.com: wp2shell RCE Vulnerability
  4. SecurityWeek: wp2shell WordPress Vulnerabilities Exploited in the Wild
  5. CVE-2026-63030 Record

Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260720-0800

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