Microsoft Patched a Record 973 Security Holes, and an AI Found Some of Them
September's Patch Tuesday is the largest ever: 973 fixes, 113 critical, two already under attack, and three flaws in Copilot products. Microsoft says an agentic scanning system helped surface part of the batch.
Microsoft shipped its September security updates on Tuesday and the count is the largest in the history of Patch Tuesday: 973 vulnerabilities fixed in one go. Of those, 113 are rated critical and 82 of the critical ones allow remote code execution, meaning an attacker could run their own software on your machine without physically touching it. Two are zero-days already being exploited in real attacks, which is the category that matters most: CVE-2026-85880 in the Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call component and CVE-2026-81963 in the Windows Update stack.
The spread across products is wide. Microsoft attributes 723 of the fixes to Windows itself, 111 to Office, 62 to SQL Server, 22 to developer tools, 16 to SharePoint Server and nine to Exchange. Three of the patches concern AI products directly: two information disclosure bugs in GitHub Copilot and VS Code, CVE-2026-81381 and CVE-2026-81380, and an elevation of privilege flaw in Copilot Studio, CVE-2026-80098, which carries a severity score of 9.3 out of 10 and stems from improperly verifying a cryptographic signature. An Azure AI Language privilege bug was patched too. Microsoft says part of this batch was surfaced by what it calls a proprietary multi-model agentic scanning system running across the Windows codebase, in other words AI models hunting for bugs in Microsoft’s own code.
What is behind this
A record number is not automatically bad news. A patch count measures how many problems were found and fixed, not how many exist, and finding more is generally what you want. The interesting detail is the reason the number jumped: Microsoft is pointing machine reviewers at millions of lines of old code and they are turning things up that human review missed for years.
That cuts both ways, and everyone in security knows it. The same class of tool works just as well for someone looking for a way in. Defenders have an advantage for now because they have the source code and the attackers mostly do not, but the gap is narrower than it used to be. Meanwhile the Copilot Studio flaw is a reminder that AI products are ordinary software underneath, with ordinary bugs in signature checking and permissions, and they inherit every risk that comes with that.
What this means for you: Install the updates. If you are on a personal Windows machine, Windows Update handles it, but the two exploited zero-days mean this is not a month to postpone the restart for two weeks. If you use GitHub Copilot or VS Code, update the extensions as well, not just the operating system, because extension updates do not always ride along. If you run Copilot Studio at work, that 9.3 is worth flagging to whoever owns it. And if you have ever wondered whether AI is doing anything useful behind the scenes, this is a concrete answer: it is reading Microsoft’s source code, and it is finding things.
Sources
Source: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/microsoft-patch-tuesday-for-september-2026/
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