npm Package Security in the Age of AI Agents: What Changed and What Catches It

An analysis piece argues that agentic AI coding assistants have removed the human checkpoint between dependency selection and installation, opening npm to two attack patterns: slopsquatting (attackers pre-registering the package names LLMs predictably hallucinate) and MCP RCE (a critical vulnerability in a widely used MCP bridge with 437K+ downloads that fires full remote code execution when a client autonomously connects to an untrusted server). It contends SAST and SCA cannot catch these and that detection must move to the registry and install/OS layer.