let me present a case of ai-induced overconfidence.
btw, if your company is doing this, call it out. it is a dumb assumption, and let me tell you why.
one of your security leads or engineers starts using claude code or codex, or builds a cool wrapper around them. it finds some bugs, of course. they run it repeatedly, burn shit ton of tokens, fix everything it finds, and eventually the scanner goes quiet.
the next thing that happens is they decide the bug bounty program is a waste of money. after all, how could some random hunter find anything their sophisticated pipeline missed? what could an external auditing firm possibly find that their agents couldn't? so they cut the program.
but if you are truly confident that your pipeline has exhausted the vulnerability space, shouldn't you be willing to increase the bounty? wouldn't that be the best way to show your c-level bros that the ai spend actually worked and wasn't wasted on some wrapper you vibecoded in a week?
or..... maybe you don't want to incentivize people to test that assumption. because how would you explain to your boss that, after burning through all those tokens, some bug bounty hunter still found a nasty vulnerability?
your cool wrapper finding bugs does not prove that no bugs remain. it only proves that the wrapper can find subset of vulnerabilities and researcher with taste will always find a way in. the entire point of a bug bounty program is to incentivize skilled researchers to find the bugs your internal tools, agents, and engineers missed.
think about it, why do openai and anthropic still run bug bounty programs that pay $100k for critical vulnerabilities? they have effectively unlimited tokens and run all kinds of crazy agent loops and automated security workflows. yet i bet they will pay that $100k, because software is vast and complex, and someone with taste will always find a bug your pipeline missed.
remember,
researcher with taste + ai(this is where your threat actors are) > good wrapper > plain claude code/codex
if your public program is drowning in slop, move it to private. invite strong researchers and pay them vip prices like github is doing. don't have this ai competence illusion which is pretty common all around.
There is a trend of bug bounty programs reducing rewards under the guise that they can find the issues themselves with AI.
This is basically absurd, you don't pay bounties for issues you've already found. It just seems like an excuse due to limited budgets.
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