Greg Kroah-Hartman on the LLM bug deluge: “don’t panic”

Large language models have turned finding security bugs into something almost anyone can do. The consequence is predictable: nearly every free-software project — the Linux kernel included — is now swamped with security bug reports. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Greg Kroah-Hartman took the stage to describe how the kernel's security team is handling the surge.

His central message was strikingly calm: “don't panic.”

There is a clear logic behind that short phrase. LLM-based tools have lowered the barrier to bug hunting so far that reports now arrive in unprecedented volume — and not all of them are equally useful. For maintainers, this is less a new threat than a new burden: separating signal from noise at a scale the old processes were never designed for.

That is why “don't panic” reads not as a brush-off but as a working stance. The kernel's security team has long dealt with a steady stream of reports, and the arrival of another source — however powerful — is no reason to overhaul the fundamental approach. Keeping a steady hand and relying on established procedures matters more than treating every machine-generated warning as a crisis.

Source: LWN.net