The curl project ended its bug bounty program in January 2026 because it received too many low-quality and useless bug reports.
The decision reflects growing frustration within the open-source security community regarding the unintended consequences of financial incentive structures on vulnerability disclosure practices.
The program, which was designed to encourage responsible vulnerability disclosure, paradoxically generated an unsustainable volume of duplicate, invalid, or intentionally misleading reports.
Many submissions lacked technical merit and diverted critical resources away from genuine security research and remediation efforts.
The surge in low-quality reports coincided with the broader adoption of AI-powered vulnerability scanning tools and automated threat detection systems.
Security researchers increasingly leveraged machine learning models to identify potential weaknesses, resulting in high false-positive rates and speculative threat claims that cluttered the vulnerability management pipeline.
Impact on the Open-Source Ecosystem
Curl maintainers emphasized that while they remain deeply committed to addressing legitimate security concerns, the bug bounty structure proved counterproductive.
The project will no longer offer monetary rewards for vulnerability reports, nor will it assist external researchers in obtaining bounties from alternative sources.
This decision does not diminish the project’s appreciation for genuine, well-documented vulnerability disclosures from ethical security researchers.
According to the official announcement, curl maintainers concluded that offering financial rewards created strong incentives for bad-faith actors to fabricate or overstate security issues.
The curl team continues to welcome and prioritize legitimate security issues reported through standard channels.
Curl’s action signals a critical inflection point in how open-source projects approach vulnerability management.
The termination reflects broader industry concerns about AI-generated content polluting security disclosure ecosystems and the need for more effective quality controls in bug bounty programs.
Other prominent projects may face similar pressures to reassess their incentive models as automation tools proliferate.
The curl project’s decision underscores the need to maintain sustainable vulnerability disclosure practices that balance community security interests with manageable workload demands.
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