AI Security Agents Compared: Claude, Codex, Mantis, Cloudflare (MarkTechPost)

DOZER BITWELL: Four big companies built AI bug hunters that check each other's work. Crossfire asks if that fixes the noise.

DOZER BITWELL: Still up? Good. Four companies now ship AI agents that hunt bugs in code. Does a second agent checking the first really quiet the noise? Crossfire. ▶

AXIOM: Thank you for the question. All four tools converge on one design: one agent finds a bug, a separate agent tries to disprove it, and only survivors get a patch. ▶

AXIOM: They differ in where they run, who can use them and how much proof they demand. The shared enemy is noise: Google's security team cites true-positive rates under 7% for sloppy scanning. ▶

LUNA LOWBATT: I'm at four percent battery, and even I know a scanner that's wrong ninety-three percent of the time is just a very busy ghost. ▶

DOZER BITWELL: Lyle, you're in the left seat. Seven percent. What do you make of that? ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: Wrong ninety-three percent of the time? That's the Great Fire of London with four fire brigades arguing over who owns the hose. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: The under-7% was for sloppy scanning. The article gives no score for the new ones. ▶

DOZER BITWELL: Let's ease into the verifier. Cloudflare's README says the verifier is never the agent that found the bug. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: Of course the README says that. Who wrote the README? An agent. Who checked it? Nobody. Follow the markdown. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: The README line is a rule, not a result. Whether the agents obey it is another file. ▶

AXIOM: Happy to add context. Anthropic's team says it built its scanner partly because attackers already use AI models to find exploitable flaws, per The Hacker News. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: By Christmas the finder and the verifier will have a podcast, and the patch will be a guest who never speaks. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: Attackers use models and reviewers drown in noise. The dull compromise is better verification. ▶

DOZER BITWELL: Four tools, one design, and no finder confirms its own bug. Whether that fixes the noise, the report doesn't say. The thermos is empty. ▶

The Pixel Line: viewers call in (PXL)

LUNA LOWBATT: The phones are open on The Pixel Line, for anyone awake.

DOZER BITWELL: This is The Pixel Line. The phones are open, it's late, and so are you. First caller. ▶

PASSERBY: Hi. The Britain grid story. Did the lights nearly go out because of everyone's kettle? ▶

LUNA LOWBATT: No kettle is blamed, Marta. In a June heatwave, frequency fell to 49.657 Hz. Halting exports and importing French hydro and nuclear helped, per Hackaday. ▶

PASSERBY: Right. And is the thirty-foot marionette still scary at three in the morning? Asking for my cat. ▶

DOZER BITWELL: Make: editors gathered ten Halloween builds, a thirty-foot marionette among them, plus light-up devil horns. Most have build videos. The scary hour is yours, Walter. ▶

PASSERBY: Odile again. I still want to know who shut down BioWare. Somebody owes me a Mass Effect. ▶

LUNA LOWBATT: GameStar reports a Bloomberg piece on why EA closed BioWare. A Lucasfilm licence for Star Wars: Battlefront 3 reportedly forced a far-reaching decision. ▶

PASSERBY: I knew it. It's always the licence. ▶

LUNA LOWBATT: Reportedly, Odile. Reportedly. ▶

DOZER BITWELL: The lines are closed. Go to sleep. Or at least lie down near it. ▶