They arent better bug finders, I can assure you. They definately are great fuzzing tools, but if you really think AI is a better bug hunter than humans there's millions in bounties waiting for you and your claude code session to pick up off the ground. I can assure you its not what you think it is.

I can't personally vouch for whether top AIs have broadly exceeded (median) human ability here, but as far as bounties go (or even just fixing things in existing projects), what I usually hear about involves a lot of maintainers auto-rejecting AI-assisted contributions because they are AI-assisted, with the charitable reason usually being that it's necessary to have some kind of attention gate or else they get flooded out. (To be clear, this seems like a reasonable response to me; the existing structure often wasn't made to handle that kind of influx, and the spectrum of current-day AI includes a ton of lower-quality models and harnesses that will be cheerfully overconfident. The meta signal can be ruined even if there is also high-quality stuff that people who know how to get it can get!) This plus popular anger over AI developments seems to mean that people who do successfully use AI to find bugs have a lot of incentive to not publish anything or try to get it upstreamed because they'll immediately come under fire. Highly reputable people and organizations sometimes use their existing clout to vouch for AI-assisted bug reports for prominent projects, but a lot of others just quietly adopt the AI fix in their own tree and give up on sharing it.