73 Seconds to Breach, 24 Hours to Patch: The Case for Autonomous Validation

**Executive summary:** Picus warns that AI has compressed offense timelines to machine speed: Anthropic's Mythos produced hundreds of working browser exploits and thousands of zero-days (over 99% unpatched), CVE-to-exploit median times have fallen to ~10 hours, and an AI-enabled FortiGate campaign compromised 2,516 devices in 106 countries — demonstrating that automated exploit generation and autonomous campaigns pose an immediate, large-scale threat requiring autonomous validation and faster cross-team remediation.