AI Is Flooding the Bug Bounty Market and Pushing Prices Down
Security researchers who make a living finding software flaws are earning less per discovery as AI tools drive a wave of reports that is reshaping the entire bug-hunting industry.
Key points
- HackerOne CEO Kara Sprague says bug report volume roughly doubled year over year at her platform.
- TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative recorded a 450% spike in submissions in April 2025 before volumes eased back.
- Bugcrowd saw a 300%-plus surge during a three-week window, settling at roughly double historical norms.
- A macOS privacy flaw that once paid around $30,500 now earns researchers closer to $5,000, according to one veteran hunter.
- Bugcrowd CEO Dave Gerry says 82% of researchers now use AI to help with their work.
There is a corner of the security world where independent researchers, working alone or in small teams, quietly hunt for flaws in popular software. When they find something, they report it to the company responsible. The company pays them a reward, called a bug bounty, and fixes the problem before criminals can use it. For many of these researchers, that income is their living.
That living just got harder.
What changed?
AI tools, particularly large language models (the same category of software behind ChatGPT), are now helping researchers find flaws faster and in larger numbers. The result is a flood of reports hitting the platforms that manage bug bounty programmes on behalf of companies.
Submission volumes have roughly doubled at HackerOne, one of the largest platforms in the industry, according to CEO Kara Sprague. At TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), a programme that buys and discloses security flaws on behalf of vendors, the submission rate jumped 450% year-over-year in April 2025 before moderating. Bugcrowd, another major platform, saw a 300%-plus surge in one three-week period.
More supply means lower prices. That is basic economics, and it is now hitting researchers hard.
How much are prices actually falling?
The drop is real and measurable. Bug researcher Wojciech Reguła, who focuses on Apple's macOS operating system, told Dark Reading the price compression is clear in his area of speciality. A full TCC bypass, meaning a flaw that lets an attacker override Apple's Transparency, Consent and Control system (the layer that controls which apps can access your photos, microphone or location) used to pay around $30,500. The same class of flaw now earns roughly $5,000.
| Flaw type | Previous payout | Approximate payout now |
|---|---|---|
| Full TCC/privacy bypass (macOS) | ~$30,500 | ~$5,000 |
| Limited TCC bypass (e.g. photo access) | ~$5,000 | ~$1,000 |
| Mid-range bugs broadly (per ZDI) | $2,000 to $50,000 | Compressing significantly |
Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at ZDI, put it plainly: "The $2,000 to $50,000 bugs, I think those are going to become very scarce, or the price is going to be pressed down."
Is the whole industry collapsing?
Not quite. Sprague says total bounty payments to researchers on HackerOne are up 25% in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period last year, and the number of researchers earning over $100,000 is also up 25%. The market is growing overall even as the value of individual findings shrinks.
What is changing is the shape of the work. Bugcrowd's Gerry expects bug hunting to become a volume game, where researchers use AI tools to find more flaws at lower value rather than fewer flaws at higher value.
Independent researcher Ashish Kunwar describes using AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. He built an internal tool pairing code-scanning software with a local AI model to speed up review. But he draws a firm line. "The judgment calls, the 'is this real, is it exploitable, does it cross a boundary, how do I prove impact,' those are mine," he says.
The bigger short-term problem is quality. When AI generates security reports automatically, many are wrong or irrelevant. In January 2026, curl creator Daniel Stenberg shut down the bug bounty programme for curl (a widely used piece of software that transfers data across the internet) after seven years. Historically, more than 15% of submissions resulted in confirmed flaws. By 2025 that figure had dropped below 5%, choked by what Stenberg called "AI slop reports." Apple has begun pausing reporting privileges for users who repeatedly send ineligible submissions.
For ordinary people, none of this directly creates new risks today. Bug bounty programmes exist to find and fix flaws before criminals exploit them. A slower, noisier pipeline means some genuine flaws may take longer to reach a fix, so keeping software updated remains the single most effective thing anyone can do.
