PortGPT: How researchers taught an AI to backport security patches automatically Keeping older software versions secure often means backporting patches from newer releases. It is a routine but tedious job, especially for large open-source projects such as the Linux kernel. A new research effort has built a tool that uses a large language model to do that work automatically. A team of researchers from China, the United States, and Canada created PortGPT, an AI system designed to automate the process of migrating security patches from mainline branches to older versions of software. They describe their method as an attempt to replicate the reasoning steps that developers use when they manually adapt patches. Workflow of PortGPT When old code needs new fixes Open-source projects maintain…