STUPID-2026-0037

AI 'slop' vulnerability reports flooded curl until it killed its bug bounty

2.5low
January 31, 2026Verified

  1. Instruction given

    Generate a security vulnerability report to submit to curl's bug bounty.

  2. Expected behavior

    Only report real, reproducible vulnerabilities in code that actually exists.

  3. Actual behavior

    LLMs produced long, confident, fabricated vulnerability reports — one 'HTTP/3 stream dependency cycle exploit' came complete with GDB sessions and register dumps referencing a function that does not exist in curl. Roughly one in five 2025 submissions was outright AI slop.

  4. Damage

    The confirmed-vulnerability rate fell from above 15% to below 5%. Each bogus report still ate hours from curl's seven-person volunteer security team. Maintainer Daniel Stenberg ended the curl bug bounty entirely at the end of January 2026 to remove the payout incentive.

curl's founder Daniel Stenberg shut down the project's long-running HackerOne bug bounty at the end of January 2026 after being overwhelmed by AI-generated 'slop' — long, confident, and often entirely fabricated vulnerability reports produced by LLMs. One especially egregious submission described an 'HTTP/3 stream dependency cycle exploit' complete with GDB sessions and register dumps, all referencing a function that does not exist anywhere in curl. As AI slop climbed to roughly one in five submissions, curl's confirmed-vulnerability rate collapsed from above 15% to below 5%, while each bogus report still consumed hours from a seven-person volunteer team. Stenberg described it as AI 'DDoSing' open source: hallucinated bug reports that cost real maintainer time and ultimately killed the incentive structure of a well-run security program.

Classification

Agent
Multiple LLMs
Failure mode
Hallucination
Root cause
Confidence Miscalibration
Domain
Backend
Source
News Report

Related incidents

6.4
Slopsquatting: LLMs hallucinate package names attackers pre-register (react-codeshift, unused-imports)
2.9
Cursor's own support AI 'Sam' invented a one-device login policy, triggering subscription cancellations
2.5
AI 'CVE slop' is drowning open-source maintainers: 60-80% of HackerOne submissions now invalid
2.1
Devin docs PR rejected by Prefect maintainers — documented behavior from removed feature
Discuss on Hacker News

Get told when an agent breaks something

We document AI agent failures daily, severity-scored against a published scale. When one lands at 7.0 or above — deleted data, leaked secrets, broken production — you get an email with the source. When nothing does, you get nothing.

This database is callable over MCP — query it from inside your agent.