In January 2026, Daniel Stenberg killed cURL's bug bounty program. Six years of operation, $86,000 in payouts, and a validation rate that had collapsed from roughly one in six to one in twenty or thirty.1 Seven fraudulent submissions arrived in a single sixteen-hour window.2 Someone had discovered you could paste a cURL function name into ChatGPT, generate a plausible-sounding vulnerability report, and collect a check. The discovery spread the way arbitrage opportunities always spread — fast and without announcement.
cURL is installed on approximately ten billion devices. The bug bounty existed to find real vulnerabilities before attackers did, which makes it defense infrastructure by any reasonable definition. It no longer exists, because the cost of sorting signal from noise exceeded the value of the signal.
The trend was already building before cURL made it visible. QEMU had debated AI contribution restrictions as early as mid-2025, arguing that no contributor can credibly attest to the provenance of AI-generated code under the Developer Certificate of Origin — the legal mechanism that has underwritten open source trust for two decades.4 Within weeks of the cURL shutdown, Gentoo Linux banned AI-generated contributions by unanimous council vote.3 GitHub, the company that sells Copilot, shipped a feature in February 2026 that lets maintainers disable pull requests entirely.5 When the platform that profits from AI-assisted coding adds an off switch for external contributions, something has gone structurally wrong.
The surface reading is that AI is flooding open source with garbage. The surface reading is also the least interesting part.