AI is drowning software maintainers in junk security reports
AI-assisted vulnerability research has exploded, unleashing a firehose of low-quality reports on overworked software maintainers who are wasting hours sifting through noise instead of fixing real problems.
Linus Torvalds, the Linux kernel’s creator, says the flood has made the project’s security mailing list “almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.”
Too many duplicates, and too much AI slop
“If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too,” Torvalds wrote in the note accompanying the latest Linux kernel release candidate.
“If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on *top* of what the AI did. Don’t be the drive-by ‘send a random report with no real understanding’ kind of person.”
Jarom Brown, Senior Product Security Engineer at GitHub, acknowledged last week that while AI lowering the barrier to entry for security research is a welcome development, his team is being inundated by submissions that fail to demonstrate any real security impact.
These include reports without a proof of concept, theoretical attack scenarios that don’t hold up under scrutiny, and findings already covered by GitHub’s published ineligible list.
And GitHub isn’t the only recipient of this unwanted deluge.
“Programs across the industry are grappling with the same challenge, and some have shut down entirely,” he said.
GitHub has stopped short of such a drastic measure, but is now requiring submitters to validate AI-assisted findings before sending them in.
Going forward, a complete submission must also include a working proof of concept demonstrating exploitation potential and concrete security impact.
Also, reports covering known ineligible categories will be closed as Not Applicable, which may impact the submitter’s HackerOne Signal and reputation, he added.
Finally, Brown urged researchers to be concise: bloated, AI-padded reports slow down triage and waste everyone’s time.
The researcher’s view
The collateral damage extends beyond the programs themselves. Shubham Shah, co-founder of Assetnote and a respected security researcher, says organizations are now taking far longer to review legitimate reports and act on real flaws, and that’s killing the feedback loop that keeps top researchers engaged.
While bug bounty platforms like HackerOne and Bugcrowd are trying to fight the onslaught of AI-created spam reports with AI and added controls, he says that “the joy of reporting vulnerabilities to bug bounties is quickly dissipating” – and not just for him.
“Hopefully the platforms actually work this out, but until then, I can’t see myself continuing to report high quality original research to certain programs where I have meaningfully contributed for a decade when they fail to understand the difference between myself and a researcher that doesn’t have any credibility,” he added.
In the near term, some experienced researchers may retreat to private vulnerability research and invite-only bounties.
Open source bears the brunt
The AI-powered “industrialization” of vulnerability discovery is currently a much bigger problem for open source projects than big organizations like Microsoft or Google, as they rely on volunteer maintainers, whose number and time is limited.
Those limitations have, for example, led the cURL project to stop accepting HackerOne submissions and eliminate monetary rewards for security reports.
CURL lead developer Daniel Stenberg hoped the latter decision would remove the incentive for submitting AI slop, and stated his belief that “the best and our most valued security reporters still will tell us when they find security vulnerabilities.”
The project switched to welcoming reports via GitHub or email, but a month later reverted to using HackerOne because those two avenues proved less effective than expected for reporting vulnerabilities. However, the project decided to stick with their decision not to offer bounties for bug reports.
“From that day, the nature of the security report submissions have changed. The slop situation is not a problem anymore,” Stenberg noted in April.
The number of reports rose, their quality was higher (even if they were compiled with the help of AI), and the rate of confirmed vulnerabilities surpassed the 2024 pre-AI level.
While that change was welcome, Stenberg believes that the raised influx of “good” vulnerability reports will present a different problem for open source projects. “This avalanche is going to make maintainer overload even worse. Some projects will have a hard time to handle this kind of backlog expansion without any added maintainers to help,” he pointed out.
In the wake of cURL’s departure and return, HackerOne acknowledged the problem AI slop may represent for under-resourced organizations, and advised customers to refine the scope and submission guidelines to reduce noise, use AI-assisted triage tools, and pair that automation with human oversight.
“As AI makes it easier to automate submissions, preserving signal quality becomes critical so open source maintainers can stay focused on fixing real issues,” Michiel Prins, Co-founder & Senior Director, Product Management at HackerOne, told Help Net Security.
“Our focus is helping programs manage that shift with workflows that filter noise early, surface credible reports, and keep vulnerability management sustainable, so open source communities can maintain the transparency and resilience they’re known for”
The Open Source Security Foundation’s Vulnerability Disclosures Working Group is also seeking community feedback as it works to help open source maintainers tackle AI-generated junk reports. Its goals include compiling best practices, creating policy templates, and developing guidance to help maintainers spot and handle AI-assisted submissions.
UPDATE (May 19, 2026, 06:55 a.m. ET):
This article has been updated to reflect another change in cURL project’s bug bounty program, which happened in February 2026.
The original article stated that the program was moved from HackerOne to GitHub, but we were unaware that cURL returned to HackerOne since then.
The article has also been updated to include additional findings that emerged as a result of this switch and the elimination of rewards for vulnerability reports.
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