LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
- ID
- 38671
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 23 Oct 2026, 6:54 AM
- Fetched
- 23 Oct 2026, 4:59 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.anthropic.com/research/formal-verification
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 23 Oct 2026, 4:59 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reports that, in collaboration with Theorem, Claude produced formal proofs of security properties at the RISC-V assembly level across more than 100 real-world open-source libraries—claimed as the first large-scale AI formal-verification effort at that level. The post says the proof work also uncovered bugs that had survived years of testing and trillions of test runs, and frames formal verification as increasingly practical as model capabilities improve.
Why it matters
For builders, the concrete signal is that LLM-generated proofs found assembly-level bugs that extensive test suites missed, so 'we have lots of tests' is not a security guarantee for critical code. The post gives no tooling, pricing, or availability details, so the immediate decision is to track whether this proof workflow becomes accessible rather than plan a migration today.
Discussion angle
What would you require before trusting an LLM-generated proof in your stack: a reproducible proof checker, published specs, or an independent audit?