Hallucinated and vulnerable packages
A distinctive failure mode of AI coding assistants: they confidently suggest installing packages that do not exist. Attackers noticed, and register those names.
Slopsquatting
The model suggests left-pand instead of left-pad. Nobody notices the typo — it came
from the AI, so it looks authoritative. If someone has registered left-pand, your
developer has just installed a stranger's code.
This is not theoretical: the names models hallucinate are stable and predictable enough to be squatted systematically.
What Sentilai flags
The dependency detector inspects packages an assistant proposes and flags those that are:
- Nonexistent — no such package, the classic hallucination.
- Vulnerable — a known CVE, checked against the open vulnerability database.
- Suspicious — published very recently, which for a package the model "knows about" is a contradiction worth noticing.
In Activity, the offending package names appear in a tooltip on the finding badge, so you can see exactly what was proposed.
The Observatory
Sentilai publishes an anonymized feed of the package names that are commonly hallucinated across organizations. It is public and needs no authentication — useful for your own supply-chain tooling, and it is a genuine community good.
Contribution is opt-in and k-anonymous: a name is only included once enough separate organizations have seen it, so nothing traceable to you is ever published.