The Economics of Security Vulnerabilities: Why Discovery Is Not Commoditizing

This blog post challenges the narrative that AI is making vulnerability discovery a cheap commodity, arguing that while AI has automated shallow discovery and exploit reproduction, the most valuable vulnerabilities remain scarce and increasingly expensive. The author points to market evidence—broker prices for top exploits have risen from tens of thousands a decade ago to $7–$9 million today—demonstrating that discovery is not commoditizing, because valuable vulnerabilities follow a power-law distribution where the critical, exclusive findings that matter are outside the reach of generic, shared AI tools. The exclusivity window is the entire source of a vulnerability's value, and when everyone queries the same public models, discovery becomes correlated and worthless for high-stakes defense. The post further explains that the "tail" of difficult-to-find vulnerabilities moves continuously, as each new capability raises the floor but exposes a new ceiling, and that the apex vulnerabilities for most organizations (like unauthenticated RCE in enterprise software) are where attacker economies concentrate. It concludes that in adversarial markets, defenders must pursue exclusive discovery capabilities that go beyond what attackers can also access, otherwise they are merely achieving a "tie" rather than a true security advantage. 

https://aisle.com/blog/the-economics-of-security-vulnerabilities-why-discovery-is-not-commoditizing

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