Torvalds: AI bug hunters clog Linux security

The drive-by automated research era is hitting its first major bottleneck as maintainer burnout from AI-generated noise reaches a breaking point. Torvalds argues that bugs found by commodity AI are not secrets, and reporting them publicly prevents redundant triaging of identical reports. This noise has turned kernel maintenance into "make-believe work," shifting focus away from actual development. The community is now raising the bar, treating automated reports without a verified reproducer or a proposed patch as low-value noise. Meanwhile, maintainers like Greg Kroah-Hartman are successfully using custom AI tools like "Clanker T1000" to fix stable-branch bugs.