Apple's Bug Bounty: Limitations due to AI spam in control

Apple has been forced to cap security reports for its bug bounty program because it is being swamped by false findings generated by artificial intelligence tools. As a researcher or casual cybersecurity observer, you are seeing a multi-million dollar bounty system falter due to the reckless use of LLMs.

The artificial intelligence factor

When the Financial Times revealed Apple's new ceiling, it became clear that generative LLMs have created a huge problem for the security departments of the tech giants. Any "amateur" researcher can now feed a piece of code into a chatbot and receive dozens of theoretical vulnerability reports. According to the data that has seen the light of day, the vast majority of these reports are non-existent bugs or figments of the algorithm's imagination.

The result? Apple's security people spend their time filtering out noise instead of actually investigating exploits that threaten millions of users. At TechNoid, we've previously covered the rise of automated hacking tools, όμως η μετάβαση από τα scripts στα LLM hallucinations αλλάζει εντελώς τους κανόνες του παιχνιδιού.

The case of Bynario

Το μέγεθος του προβλήματος φάνηκε καθαρά από την εμπειρία της κυβερνοασφαλιστικής startup Bynario, η οποία χρησιμοποίησε το ChatGPT για να εντοπίσει πάνω από 50 bugs στο macOS σε space μόλις τριών εβδομάδων. Ανάμεσα σε αυτά υπήρχε και ένα κρίσιμο exploit τύπου privilege escalation που θα μπορούσε να δώσει σε έναν εισβολέα ανεμπόδιστη πρόσβαση σε οποιοδήποτε Mac.

However, Bynario found itself at a dead end. Having exhausted the limit of eight reports it could send to Apple in 2025 and another five in 2026, the system banned it. While it found a truly dangerous backdoor, it risked being left out of the process because the submission pool was filled with low-quality automated reports from others. Apple is already reviewing their submissions, but the incident proves that the current evaluation model is “broken.”

Apple's dilemma

It's ironic that Apple is fighting AI with its own weapons, but also falling victim to it. The company has one of the most generous bug bounty programs in the industry, offering rewards of up to $2 million for real-world exploit chains, which can exceed $5 million with bonuses.

At the same time, however, Apple itself uses tools like Codex Security OpenAI to identify and fix vulnerabilities, going so far as to patch nearly 90 vulnerabilities in a single update like iOS 26.6. The problem isn't the technology itself, but the fact that Apple itself relies mostly on humans to review the reports it receives externally, creating a huge productivity bottleneck.

Our opinion at TechNoid

We at TechNoid believe that Apple’s cap is nothing more than a temporary safety net, not a solution. Banning or limiting submissions ultimately punishes serious researchers who use smart tools to get their work done faster, while leaving the backdoor open for malicious hackers who don’t care about bounties and will exploit loopholes in the dark. If Apple wants to protect its ecosystem, it should invest in automated AI filtering systems that will separate real exploits from chatbot “delusions,” instead of putting human hackers in charge.