Google’s Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program closed its product vulnerability intake on October 1. Not retired. Not restructured into something better. Frozen, because the volume of AI-generated submissions got high enough that Google would rather accept nothing than keep sorting through it.
That is a remarkable thing for a company with Google’s resources to say out loud. The OSS VRP was built to pay outside researchers for finding holes in the open source software Google’s own stack rests on. It worked on an asymmetry: hard to find a real bug, cheap to verify a report about one. Someone sends you a reproducible crash, you reproduce it, you pay or you don’t.
The cheap half got cheaper
Language models destroyed that asymmetry from the wrong end. A model will happily produce a report with a confident title, a severity score in the right shape, a plausible-looking call path, and three paragraphs of fluent prose about an exploit that does not exist. It costs the sender a few cents and ten seconds. It costs the triage engineer twenty minutes of reading source to confirm the function in question never receives attacker-controlled input.
Multiply that by whatever “significant rise” means internally and you get the current outcome. curl’s maintainers have been shouting about the same dynamic for a while now, and they don’t have Google’s headcount. The difference is that curl is a volunteer-shaped project and Google is Google. When the well-funded version of the program taps out, the problem isn’t staffing.
A freeze is the laziest available fix
I think Google made the wrong call, and I think they know it. Shutting the door punishes exactly the people the program was designed to attract. The researcher who spent two weeks fuzzing a dependency chain now has nowhere to send the result, while the person running a slop pipeline moves on to the next program that still accepts email.
There are harder options that actually target the cost structure. Require a working proof of concept before a human looks at anything, no exceptions, no prose-only submissions. Gate intake behind reputation, so first-time submitters queue behind people with a track record. Charge a refundable deposit, returned on any report judged non-frivolous, forfeited on slop. That last one is unpopular because it feels like charging for goodwill, but goodwill is what just collapsed. A submission that costs nothing to make is now worth roughly nothing to receive.
The uncomfortable version of this: bug bounties were always subsidized by the fact that writing a convincing lie about software took real effort. That subsidy is gone and it is not coming back. Every program running an open intake form is on the same clock, and most of them have smaller triage teams than Google.
As of now the product vulnerability form is still closed, with no reopening date announced. Google’s other VRP tracks remain open, which means the slop has somewhere to go.