Bitcoin Core will now patch bugs an AI can easily find right away and publish advisories, instead of holding them under long embargoes

Bitcoin Core, the software most of the bitcoin network runs, has changed how it discloses security bugs. A change merged this week lets maintainers mark a bug as easy to discover during triage, meaning one a simple prompt to a large language model could find, CoinDesk reported. Those fixes will be backported to every supported version and shipped in a point release as soon as possible, with a security advisory.

Before, disclosure depended on severity. Medium and high-severity flaws stayed under embargo until two weeks after the last affected version reached end of life, which CoinDesk said could last about a year.

Antoine Poinsot of Chaincode Labs wrote the proposal. "This is largely due to LLMs drastically reducing the bar to find certain classes of issues or identify covert fixes," he said, per CoinDesk. Longtime security researcher Antoine Riard wanted Core to keep the choice of shipping fixes quietly; Poinsot argued a warning without details could add risk.

The trade-off is less testing time before fixes reach users. No bug has been flagged under the new rule so far.