# 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.