source projects, many of them thinly funded

AI is adding to the review load on open-source projects, many of them thinly funded AI coding tools are making open source software harder to maintain and secure, according to six authors writing for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Technology Policy Council, among them Simson Garfinkel and Josiah Dykstra. The tools write code and find security flaws quickly . The maintainers who decide what enters a project’s official release still have to judge that output themselves.

That burden reaches anyone who runs software. Open source code sits inside phones, cars, cloud systems and AI platforms, and a Harvard Business School paper the authors cite estimates that firms would spend 3.5 times more on software without it. Many projects lack reliable revenue, and deferred maintenance on those projects can leave security holes in the software built on them.