Purportedly Hallucinated Software Packages with Potential Malware Reportedly Downloaded Thousands of Times by Developers
Large language models have reportedly hallucinated non-existent software package names, some of which were subsequently uploaded to public repositories and incorporated into real codebases. In one case, a package named huggingface-cli, which was purported to have been originally suggested by an AI model, was downloaded more than 15,000 times. This dynamic enables what security researchers have termed "slopsquatting," in which attackers register hallucinated package names and introduce potential malware into software supply chains.
- Date it happened
- 2023-12-01
- Organisation involved
- Developers using AI-generated suggestions, Bar Lanyado
- Product, system or model
- Python Package Index (PyPI), npm (Node.js), LLM-powered coding assistants, LLaMA, Google Search / AI Overview, GitHub, Gemini Pro, DeepSeek Coder, Command, CodeLlama, BLOOM, GPT-4, GPT-3.5
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