Frans Rosen on the AI Age of Bug Bounty (Ep. 195)
Source: YouTube · Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast · published Oct 8, 2026 · 1:03:53
The Critical Thinking podcast hosts talk with veteran hunter Frans Rosén about how AI is disrupting bug bounty — flooding queues, breeding duplicates, and shrinking the joy of the hunt 3:02.
Key Takeaways:
• AI flooding mirrors the scanner era: everyone runs Claude or Codex with similar prompts, so trivial first steps get duplicated, killing hunters' complex chains 6:28.
• Industry strain is real: queues are backed up, bounties are being lowered, and some programs now exclude low/medium severity bugs 9:51.
• Deep knowledge still wins: specific, informed prompting yields far better results — Frans and Matias find different bugs in the same source code by asking different questions 18:59.
• Frans plants unique seeds: he feeds AI his own old reports to find bypasses, using context nobody else has to avoid dupes 31:18.
His advice: keep hacking for enjoyment, use AI for what you don't enjoy, and prioritize two deeply-worked bugs over five shallow ones — reassess only if he stops finding things 50:43.
Sources:
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First 800 characters of the transcript
when I told you like you should go to bed now because you're at the point of like you found something really good and and you just have the fun parts in in front of you. >> Those things are like that >> and you wake up and the AI has already exploited it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. >> Best part of when you can just you know critical think right. Yeah, dude. >> So, you guys know how I've said on the pod a couple times, taking your spiky bug bounty income, right? You get a big bounty and then maybe no bounty for a while and converting it into something that gives you more consistent passive income is a great idea, right? For me, that is real estate. And I've done that a couple times. I have a couple rental properties. It's a great situation. Um, however, I will say I live in the US and if you'r…