News, news analysis, and commentary on the latest trends in cybersecurity technology. Apple Reverses Age-Old Patch Policy to Keep Up With AI Expect more compressed patching cycles from Apple going forward, as attackers leverage artificial intelligence to reduce time to exploit. Apple is changing its approach to security patching, in response to the growing threat of accelerated artificial intelligence (AI) attacks. The company has historically saved big, bundled sets of bug fixes for new versions of its operating system (OS). That's set to change. The company released a variety of security updates June 29 for iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and the Safari browser, untethered to any major version releases. It's hardly the first time it's released security updates out-of-band, but the motivation was different this time. According to Reuters, the company said "it was adapting to the reality that, given the ability of artificial intelligence to speed the development of malicious hacking tools, it needed to reduce the time between when updates were first made public and when they were put into customers' hands." "I think faster patching helps, but it doesn't fully close the gap, because it's still a single point of defense with no fallback if something slips through," Rocky Cole, CEO of iVerify warns. "And against AI-accelerated discovery, something will slip through." Dark Reading has reached out to Apple for comment on this story. Why Apple Is Changing its Patching Cadence In speaking with reporters, Apple emphasized that none of the newly released fixes pertained to actively exploited vulnerabilities. In other words, the point wasn't to address any known cyberattacks, but to start updating more frequently in general. "The data isn't in dispute when it comes to the need for a different patching cadence," Cole says, citing Mandiant's time to exploit (TTE) findings. "In 2018, the average time