Bitcoin Core Rewrites Its Security Policy for a World Where AI Finds Bugs in One Prompt

{"heading_1":"The Shift in Bitcoin Core's Security Policy","paragraph_1":"Bitcoin Core, the main software for the Bitcoin network, has updated its security policy to address vulnerabilities that can be easily found by AI models. The update reflects the growing impact of AI on security, particularly in the context of Bitcoin.","paragraph_2":"The new policy targets a tension at the heart of any disclosure policy. Bitcoin Core, which runs most of the nodes underpinning the network, has long favored a lengthy embargo period, keeping security fixes quiet and often holding them until the next major release.","paragraph_3":"However, developers concluded that for bugs an attacker can surface with a single AI prompt, a long embargo 'achieves little but delays the availability of a fixed release.'","paragraph_4":"For those, Bitcoin Core will now backport a fix to every maintained release and cut a new version as quickly as possible, publishing details in a security advisory alongside the patched software, rather than sitting on it.","paragraph_5":"The logic, as Poinsot put it in the discussion, is that covertly patching such a bug 'would achieve little,' since a trivial AI scan can find it and an aggressive backport gives it away anyway.","paragraph_6":"The shift reflects how sharply AI has reshaped the security landscape around Bitcoin. Over the summer, a volunteer 'Bitcoin Red Team' began racing to find AI-discoverable flaws before attackers do.","paragraph_7":"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 wallets.","paragraph_8":"One Bitcoin bridge even shut down after concluding AI was finding bugs faster than it could fix them."}