The cURL project is terminating its bug bounty program, citing a flood of nonsensical, AI-generated error reports that waste maintainer time. The move highlights a growing crisis in open-source maintenance as automated tools lower the barrier for low-quality submissions.
The cURL project, a fundamental internet library used by billions of devices, is ending its bug bounty program at the end of January 2026. The decision, announced by maintainer Daniel Stenberg, is a direct response to a deluge of low-quality, AI-generated bug reports that have overwhelmed the project's volunteer maintainers.
Stenberg has been vocal about the problem for over a year, coining the phrase "death by a thousand slops" to describe the cumulative burden of these reports. "AI slop and bad reports in general have been increasing even more lately, so we have to try to brake the flood in order not to drown," Stenberg told Swedish electronics industry news site Elektroniktidningen. The core issue is time: determining whether an AI-generated report is nonsense, an exaggeration, or a genuine but misunderstood finding requires significant manual effort.
The bounty program, which has paid out over $101,020 across 87 reports since its inception, was intended to incentivize security researchers to find and report vulnerabilities. However, the financial incentive has apparently been co-opted by automated systems and individuals using AI tools to generate speculative reports without proper validation. While Stenberg acknowledges that over 100 legitimate, AI-assisted reports have led to corrections, the overwhelming majority are "pure nonsense."
The move has drawn support from Joshua Rogers, a well-known bug hunter who himself uses AI tools to assist his research. In a 2025 year-end post and subsequent comments to Elektroniktidningen, Rogers called the termination "a good move and worth a bigger consideration by others." He argues that the primary incentive for skilled researchers isn't the money, but the reputation. "The real incentive for finding a vulnerability in cURL is the fame ('brand is priceless'), not the hundred or few thousand dollars," Rogers stated, noting that a $10,000 maximum bounty is "not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, for somebody capable of finding a critical vulnerability in curl."
However, Rogers also acknowledged the nuanced impact of bounties across different socio-economic contexts. "The value of a bounty is not the same for every reporter -- in low socio-economic locations, a reward which would be the cost of lunch in Sweden can be massive," he said. This highlights a tension in open-source security: while bounties can democratize participation, they also lower the barrier for spam.
The cURL case is not isolated. Many open-source projects face similar challenges. The core problem is a misalignment of incentives. Automated tools can generate plausible-sounding reports with minimal effort, while the cost of verification falls entirely on the project maintainers. Removing the financial incentive for raw report submission shifts the burden back to the reporter to ensure their finding is valid and significant before submitting it.
This decision forces a reevaluation of how open-source projects manage external contributions. It suggests a potential shift towards reputation-based systems or more stringent submission requirements. For projects considering similar measures, the key will be balancing the need for genuine security reports with the need to filter out automated noise. The cURL project's move is a pragmatic, if drastic, step to preserve maintainer sanity and focus on substantive contributions.
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