Bitcoin Core, the software most of the bitcoin network runs on, will stop sitting on bug fixes for months when the bug is one an AI could find again, after its maintainers merged a change to the project’s security policy on Thursday.

Core previously graded every reported vulnerability by severity and timed disclosure accordingly. Low-severity flaws were revealed two weeks after the next major version shipped. Medium and high ones stayed under embargo until two weeks after the last affected version reached end of life.

The logic was that shipping a fix quietly and explaining it much later kept attackers from learning about a hole before the people running nodes, the computers that check and relay every bitcoin transaction, had upgraded.

But the old rule was built for a world where finding a bug took skill, and the spread of AI tools has broken how that process worked.

“We recently experienced an increase in the number of reports for security vulnerabilities that can be easily (re-)discovered,” Antoine Poinsot, the Chaincode Labs developer who wrote the change, said in his proposal.

“This is largely due to LLMs drastically reducing the bar to find certain classes of issues or identify covert fixes.”

” Those bugs get a fix copied back to every version Core still supports, shipped in a point release “as soon as possible” along with a security advisory carrying some details.

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