Why does my AI assistant recommend packages that turn out to be malware?
Opportunity
When a code-generating model scaffolds a project, it invents package names at rates between 4.6% and 6.1% even on today's frontier models. Attackers register those hallucinated names as malicious packages before developers notice. Researchers studying five frontier models released between October 2025 and March 2026 found 127 package names all five models invent identically; 53 of them remain registrable by an attacker after each registry's existing defenses. No IDE plugin, no CI step, and no package manager checks whether a model-suggested package name was ever real before resolving it. The only current advice is to read every import manually, which no team does at scale.
Why it matters
Until there is a pre-install oracle that cross-references model-suggested names against real registry data, every AI-assisted build is one hallucinated import away from installing malware.
How I score the opportunity
The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.
How much pain it causes when it shows up.
How often people actually run into it.
How little good tooling exists for it today.
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