A real macOS flaw worth $200K went unreported because Apple's bug bounty inbox was full of AI slop

AI as a cybersecurity risk, but not the way you'd think. Apple is capping the number of bug reports security researchers can submit and enforcing a 30-day cooldown period. A flood of low-quality, AI-generated reports with hallucinated vulnerabilities is clogging the review pipeline, the Financial Times reports. Researchers can request a higher quota.

The cap creates real security gaps: Italian startup Bynario used ChatGPT to find a serious macOS vulnerability that could give attackers full control over a machine but couldn't report it because Apple had blocked further submissions. CEO Alfredo Pesoli estimates the flaw's black-market value at $100,000 to $200,000. Apple has since reached out to Bynario.

Meanwhile, Apple itself is using AI from Anthropic and OpenAI to hunt for vulnerabilities, and its latest updates included five times as many fixes as usual. That raises the question whether bug bounty programs can survive long-term or whether big tech companies will handle vulnerability discovery on their own. Rafe Pilling of Sophos told the FT that bug bounty programs have gone from finding vulnerabilities to validating them "at machine speed."