Crypto protocols have warned that an increase in AI use has led to a surge in bogus bug bounty submissions, putting strain on teams trying to identify real threats to their protocols. Bug bounties, a system to reward hackers for submitting reports about potential vulnerabilities, are popular in the crypto industry. Barry Plunkett, co-CEO of Cosmos Labs, said his program has seen a 900% increase in submission volume from the previous year, on the order of 20-50 per day, and that AI has made it easier to sift through large amounts of code to find possible bugs. In January, Daniel Stenberg, creator of the open-source data transfer tool curl, announced he was ending his bug bounty program due to an influx of "AI slop in vulnerability reports" and exhaustion from sifting through them.