Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software Foundation (PSF), for its resemblance to the typosquatting technique. Instead of relying on a user’s mistake, as in typosquats, threat actors rely on an AI model’s mistake.
A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000 packages), recommended in test samples were found to be fakes. Open-source models –like DeepSeek and WizardCoder– hallucinated more frequently, at 21.7% on average, compared to the commercial ones (5.2%) like GPT 4.
Researchers found CodeLlama ( hallucinating over a third of the outputs) to be the worst offender, and GPT-4 Turbo ( just 3.59% hallucinations) to be the best performer.