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Daniel Stenberg, lead developer of cURL, details the project's robust security practices and transparent vulnerability management. The cURL team employs extensive testing, code reviews, and reproducible builds to minimize risk and maintain trust. Their approach includes rapid vulnerability triage, coordinated disclosure, and strong community engagement.
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Anthropic’s **Mythos** vulnerability-hunting model identified five purported security issues in the `curl` codebase, but curl founder Daniel Stenberg and the project’s security team validated only one as a real vulnerability. Stenberg said three findings were false positives already addressed by API documentation, while another was a non-security bug; the sole confirmed issue is described as **low severity** and is expected to be fixed in `curl 8.21.0`, with disclosure planned alongside that release. He said the model was tested through Anthropic’s Project Glasswing rather than by direct access to the repository. Stenberg said the results did not support claims that Mythos is uniquely effective at finding software flaws, calling the surrounding promotion more marketing than breakthrough. He added that AI-assisted code analysis is still useful and has improved substantially over traditional static analysis, but argued Mythos showed no clear advantage over other modern AI tools already used on curl’s heavily audited codebase. Broader discussion in the security community has also pointed to orchestration frameworks and workflow design—not just frontier models—as effective ways to uncover vulnerabilities, reinforcing skepticism that a single high-end model alone represents a major leap in bug hunting.
Jul 20, 2026
The *cURL* project’s maintainer **Daniel Stenberg** announced the termination of cURL’s vulnerability reward/bug bounty program after the security team was overwhelmed by a surge of low-effort, largely **AI-generated** vulnerability submissions that consumed maintainer time and created burnout risk. Stenberg stated the small open-source team could not keep up with the volume and warned that repeated low-quality submissions would lead to bans and public criticism, framing the decision as necessary to protect project sustainability and maintainer well-being. Reporting indicates the change is being implemented via updates to cURL’s documentation (including `BUG-BOUNTY.md`) and will take effect at the end of January 2026, removing references to the project’s **HackerOne** program and stating that cURL will no longer offer rewards for reported vulnerabilities or assist researchers in obtaining compensation from third parties. The program had operated since 2019 via HackerOne and the Internet Bug Bounty, and the decision has raised concerns among users that eliminating bounties may reduce incentives for high-quality private reporting despite cURL’s widespread use across major operating systems and software stacks.
Jun 29, 2026
The *cURL* project ended its bug bounty program after maintainers reported being overwhelmed by a surge of low-quality, often AI-generated submissions that consumed significant triage time without yielding actionable security findings. cURL maintainer **Daniel Stenberg** documented the decision in a GitHub change (`BUG-BOUNTY.md`) indicating the bounty would stop at the end of January 2026, citing the “torrent” of submissions and the operational burden placed on the project’s security team. Stenberg said recent bounty activity included multiple submissions that required substantial effort to assess yet did not describe actual vulnerabilities, and he expressed hope that removing financial incentives would reduce “crap and non-well researched reports,” whether AI-generated or not. While acknowledging that AI can sometimes assist in finding legitimate bugs, he encouraged researchers to continue reporting **real security vulnerabilities** even without payment, noting that the impact of ending the bounty on future reporting quality remains to be seen.
Jun 29, 2026