A surprising share of the world's banking software runs on a language AI barely knows. OpenAI just tested how badly, then shipped the test.
AspireAI community · openai.com
A surprising share of the world's banking software runs on a language AI barely knows. OpenAI just tested how badly, then shipped the test.
COBOL is behind more than 40% of online banking systems and 95% of ATM transactions, OpenAI says, citing IBM. There is very little public COBOL code for models to learn from, and the engineers who knew it are retiring.
So OpenAI built a benchmark: hand a model the SQLite documentation and ask it to write a working database engine from scratch, in 20 languages including COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic. GPT-6 Astra averaged 87.4%, up from 26.8% for the previous model. COBOL was still hardest at 72.1%. A second test, migrating COBOL with byte-for-byte identical output, hit 97.9%. These are OpenAI's own numbers, and OpenAI itself says production migrations still need expert review.
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Two critical PHP remote code execution flaws — one found by GPT-5.6 Sol — were patched on October 21, 2026, and OpenAI published a disclosure framework alongside the fix. Fixed versions: PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. Both allow unauthenticated remote code execution, and PHP's advisory says risk is highest for mod_php, where a demonstrated exploit triggers before any application code runs. The CVEs are distinct failure modes. CVE-2026-109618 (OOM corruption): out-of-memory handling can interrupt PHP while internal request data is only partially initialized, and request cleanup may then treat the invalid data as valid. CVE-2026-109619 (stale global state): request-owned internal state can survive after its backing memory is freed, and a later request served by the same worker may use that stale state. OpenAI states GPT-5.6 Sol identified the first flaw through its Patch the Planet initiative, and that Wiz independently discovered and reported both vulnerabilities. PHP's maintainers led the fixes and release, with Wiz, Cloudflare and OpenAI contributing research and coordination. Wiz's write-up adds that it used GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon throughout, with Gemini 4 Argon contributing to finding the vulnerability and validating the patch. OpenAI describes the gap between discovery and public exploitation as a "Defender's Window," proposes a five-stage response framework, and committed $1 billion in subsidised Daybreak model access for organizations with limited security resources. Honest caveats: these are OpenAI's and Wiz's own characterizations, and OpenAI also notes the same capabilities help attackers build offensive tooling faster. PHP 8.1 and older no longer receive updates from the PHP project.