Google froze its open-source bug bounty after a flood of automated reports

Since October 1, 2026, Google has not accepted a single new product vulnerability report for its open-source projects, and has not said when payouts return beyond an update promised for early next year. Google’s notice says it is “temporarily no longer accepting OSS VRP product vulnerability submissions” and gives its reason in one line. That reason is “a significant rise in automated submissions, the vast majority of which are not valid.” Google has promised an update in the first quarter of 2027.

The program in question is Google’s Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program, known as OSS VRP, which pays outside researchers for flaws in projects Google maintains. Coverage of the notice says Google’s other reward programs are not part of the freeze, and that the pause applies to new product vulnerability reports and not to supply chain reports or reports already filed.

The OSS VRP notice and what it halts

TechCrunch, in a report by Anthony Ha, traced the freeze to posts Google made on X and on its Bug Hunters site. BleepingComputer, which dates its account October 5, quotes the same two sentences and adds the scope: the program covered Google-maintained projects such as Golang, Angular, Bazel and Protocol Buffers, with bounties from $100 up to $31,337.

The pause is narrower than “bug bounty” suggests. Supply chain vulnerability reports and previously submitted valid reports are not affected, according to BleepingComputer, and The Cyber Express adds that reports already filed remain valid. Google’s other reward channels stay open, according to those accounts: the Patch Rewards Program, which pays for security improvements to its open-source projects, the Cloud VRP and the AI VRP.

Automated submissions versus AI-generated reports

Google’s notice uses the word “automated,” and that is the word this article carries in its title. The description of those submissions as AI-written, full of hallucinated bugs, comes from Tom’s Hardware, whose Etiido Uko reported the freeze on October 3 and described engineers inundated with thousands of poorly written submissions claiming vulnerabilities that were “completely invalid or unexploitable hallucinations.” TechCrunch relays that account. Google’s statement does not itself say how many reports arrived, how many were valid, or which tools produced them.

The link to AI tools is not a stretch, because Google had already tightened this same program once. InfoWorld reported on March 20, 2026 that the OSS VRP would stop accepting low-quality AI-generated submissions and would require “higher-quality proof,” such as an OSS-Fuzz reproduction or a merged patch, for certain tiers. Google said many AI-generated reports described vulnerability triggers that did not exist or flagged bugs with minimal security impact, which swamped its triage teams.

Tom’s Hardware places the freeze among similar retreats. It reports that Linux maintainers described being completely overwhelmed after AI bug hunters pushed CVE counts to record levels, and that Intel suspended a bounty program that paid up to $100,000 per vulnerability. It also names the economics behind the flood: language models and automated scripts removed the effort that manual vulnerability discovery once required, so a submission costs almost nothing to send and real time to read.

That rule change evidently did not hold the volume down. Six months after it, the company stopped taking new product reports altogether, which is a heavier step than raising the evidence bar.

Payout range and the Q1 2027 update

The Cyber Express says the OSS VRP launched in 2022 and paid researchers from $500 to more than $31,337 depending on project tier, ranging from flagship repositories to low-priority ones. BleepingComputer gives the range as $100 to $31,337, so the floor differs between the two accounts; the top figure agrees.

The tier structure shows what the freeze costs. Under the program’s own ranking, as The Cyber Express describes it, repositories run from flagship projects at the top to low-priority ones at the bottom, and the reward scales with both the project’s tier and the severity of the flaw. A high-severity bug in a flagship project was the route to the top of the payout range; with product reports closed, that route is shut for every tier at once.

For a researcher who has just found a flaw in a Google-maintained project, the practical effect is that the reward for it is not on offer until Google says otherwise. Reports about Google Cloud code, AI products or patches to its projects still have a home, while a plain vulnerability in a project like Angular does not.

Google has not said what the revised program will look like. Its promise is only an update in the first quarter of 2027, which leaves roughly three to six months with the central channel for open-source reports closed. No source read for this article says whether the update will reopen the program, narrow it, or replace the cash rewards with something else.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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