Bitcoin · Decrypt
Bitcoin Core Rewrites Its Security Policy for a World Where AI Finds Bugs in One Prompt
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 3 sources. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
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Bitcoin Core developers have changed how the software handles certain security flaws, acknowledging that AI has made some vulnerabilities so easy to find that keeping them secret no longer makes sense.
Key facts
- In early August, an AI-driven audit logged nearly 5,000 findings across hundreds of crypto projects, and developers have scrambled to patch AI-surfaced bugs in Lightning implementations and hardware
- One Bitcoin bridge even shut down after concluding AI was finding bugs faster than it could fix them
- The project merged the policy update Thursday, after Chaincode Labs developer Antoine Poinsot opened it earlier this month citing a spike in reports of bugs that can be “easily (re-)discovered
- Bitcoin Core developers have changed how the software handles certain security flaws, acknowledging that AI has made some vulnerabilities so easy to find that keeping them secret no longer makes sense
Summary
Bitcoin Core updated its security policy to handle vulnerabilities that are “easily discoverable,” citing a spike in reports of bugs that LLMs have “drastically reduced the bar” to find. For such flaws, the project will now backport a fix to all maintained releases and ship a new version as fast as possible—with an advisory—rather than keeping it under a long embargo, since a quiet patch “would achieve little” when an AI scan can find it anyway. The shift reflects how AI has reshaped Bitcoin security, from the “Bitcoin Red Team” to AI-surfaced Lightning and wallet bugs. The project merged the policy update Thursday, after Chaincode Labs developer Antoine Poinsot opened it earlier this month citing a spike in reports of bugs that can be “easily (re-)discovered.”