AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar

Summary

Interview I was at a press luncheon at KubeCon Europe this week when, to my surprise, who should sit down next to me but long-term Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg, who lives in the Netherlands these days, was there to briefly comment on AI, Linux, and security. We spoke about how, over the last month, AI-driven activity around Linux security and code review has "really jumped" in a way no one in the open source world saw coming. "Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality," he said. "It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us." Of course, there are many Linux kernel maintainers, so for them, AI slop isn't as burdensome as it is for, say, Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL, where AI slop reports caused the cURL team to stop paying bug bounties. Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session READ MORE Things have changed, Kroah-Hartman said. "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now." No one is quite sure what's behind it. Asked what changed, Kroah-Hartman was blunt: "We don't know. Nobody seems to know why. Either a lot more tools got a lot better, or people started going, 'Hey, let's start looking at this.' It seems like lots of different groups, different companies." What is clear is the scale. "For the kernel, we can handle it," he said. "We're a much larger team, very distributed, and our increase is real – and it's not slowing down. These are tiny things, they're not major things, but we need help on this for all the open source projects." S...