AI-generated code often emerges as the villain in conversations about AI and software supply chain security. Hallucinated package names. Slopsquatting attacks. Insecure patterns lifted from training data of unknown provenance. These are real problems, and security researchers are right to name them.

But for platform engineers and DevEx leads, that conversation is also a distraction. The governance failure that will actually bite your team isn't about what AI writes. It's about what AI pulls, how fast, and whether your stack can keep up.

The dependency problem is a throughput problem

Developers make explicit dependency decisions at human speed. They choose a package, consider the version, and pull it with enough friction that a review process can, in theory, keep pace. AI coding assistants don't operate this way. They suggest, scaffold, and resolve dependencies as a background function of doing their job – and they do it with enough confidence that their recommendations land without the friction that would normally prompt a second look.

The result isn't just more dependencies. It's a qualitatively different kind of ingestion: a continuous, high-volume stream of packages entering the environment at a speed and scale that outpaces any review process your team designed before AI tools entered the picture. The governance controls you put in place when developers were the bottleneck now face a different constraint entirely – your ability to evaluate what's coming in before it's already inside.

To be fair, AI tools inherited this problem; they didn't invent it. Developers reached for the 

, grabbing the newest version on the logic that newer releases patch known CVEs, so newer meant safer. It was a reasonable shortcut that quietly traded reproducibility and stability for the assumption that upstream maintainers had things under control. Teams tolerated it because the pace of ingestion was slow enough that the risk felt abstract. What AI coding assistants do is adopt that same default behavior and execute it at a scale no human developer could match – across multiple ecosystems, for every file in a scaffold, without the occasional pause that made a developer reconsider. The mental model was already loose. AI just removed the friction that kept the consequences manageable.

 found that nearly 20% of packages recommended by large language models didn't exist in any public registry. More troubling: 43% of those hallucinated packages appeared repeatedly across multiple prompts. This is a pattern predictable enough that a malicious actor could register those packages in advance and wait for a developer to pull. This is the 

 attack surface, and it expands in direct proportion to AI adoption.

The signal from the field matches the research. One engineering team, already running their artifact repository significantly beyond its designed capacity, named AI-driven dependency explosion as the risk they were actively trying to get ahead of. Not a breach. Not a named vulnerability. The sheer volume of what AI coding tools would pull into their environment as adoption scaled. Their infrastructure had held up under human-speed development. AI-speed ingestion hadn't fully arrived yet – and they were already worried.

That's the right instinct. For teams with meaningful AI coding tool adoption, the governance problem is already compounding.

Three ways your current governance breaks at AI speed

The failure isn't dramatic and doesn't announce itself with an incident. It accumulates across three specific breakdowns, each one a consequence of governance controls calibrated for a different kind of throughput.

Volume creates an attack surface nobody owns.

 More packages mean more CVE exposure, more policy exceptions, and more surface area for a malicious or compromised package to hide inside. When dependency ingestion was slow and deliberate, a team could maintain a reasonable mental model of what lived in their environment. AI-assisted development eliminates that. Packages accumulate faster than any manual review can track, and exceptions that were once edge cases become business as usual.

Endor Labs 2025 State of Dependency Management Report

 found that only 1 in 5 dependency versions AI coding assistants recommended were safe to use – containing neither hallucinations nor known vulnerabilities. The reality of the situation is that with AI-generated code, more packages enter your environment than your current controls can evaluate.

Velocity breaks the timing assumptions your controls depend on.

 Most teams have security controls that activate at the build: scanning that runs after a package enters the environment, policies that evaluate after the pull happens. At human-speed ingestion, the gap between a package entering and a build running was small enough to manage. At AI speed, it isn't. A malicious or compromised package can move from first pull to build artifact before any downstream control flags it. The window that periodic scanning assumed would always exist has closed.

Opacity removes the human review that your policy controls assumed.

 Governance frameworks rest on an implicit assumption: a developer made a deliberate choice to pull each dependency, and that choice is reviewable and auditable. That assumption doesn't hold with AI coding tools. Ask a developer why version 2.3.1 of a specific package is in their project, and they may have no clear answer – the assistant chose it, they accepted the suggestion, and the reasoning never surfaced. The provenance trail that would normally anchor a trust decision is absent. Policy controls that gate explicit human decisions don't account for the implicit decisions AI tools make on a developer's behalf.

What governance built for AI speed actually requires

The three failure modes above share a common root: governance controls calibrated for human-speed dependency management running against AI-speed ingestion. The fix isn't better scanning or more thorough reviews. It's a different architecture for enforcement – one that matches the actual throughput of how your team now works.

Three requirements follow directly from the failure modes.

Enforcement has to happen at the point of first pull – not at the build, not post-merge. The moment a package arrives as a request is the only moment you can intercept it before it enters the environment. Every control that activates later operates on a package that's already inside. Quarantine and block capabilities that evaluate against your policies at request time close the gap that build-time scanning leaves open by design.

Re-evaluation has to be continuous, not periodic. Threat intelligence doesn't freeze when your weekly scan finishes. A package that passes on Tuesday may be flagged by Wednesday – because researchers publish a new CVE, because a maintainer account falls to credential stuffing, because a malicious version propagates through transitive dependencies before anyone notices. Continuous re-evaluation against evolving threat intelligence catches what point-in-time scanning cannot.

Coverage has to span all package formats, not just the ones your team uses most. AI coding tools pull across ecosystems without discrimination. A governance layer that covers npm but not PyPI, or Python but not Go, carries a structural gap that AI-assisted development will find. Unified enforcement across all formats – packages, containers, machine learning models – is the only way to apply consistent policy across the full surface area AI actually introduces.

Cloudsmith enforces policy at the point of first pull: when an open source package arrives as a request, it evaluates against your policies before it reaches the developer. Packages that have already cleared your policies deliver immediately; new packages clear checks before delivery. Artifacts in the platform re-evaluate continuously – as new threat intelligence arrives, and when policies change. With support for 30+ package formats in multi-format repositories, that enforcement applies across the full surface area AI-assisted development introduces – not a curated subset of it.

This isn't the argument that Cloudsmith stops AI from writing bad code. Code quality is a separate problem with its own tooling. The argument is more specific: Cloudsmith gives your governance controls the throughput and continuity they need to keep pace with AI-speed development. The controls your team built weren't wrong. They were calibrated for a volume and velocity that no longer reflects how your developers actually work.

The teams already feeling this problem are the ones with the highest AI coding tool adoption. They're a leading indicator, not an outlier. As AI-assisted development becomes the default, dependency ingestion volume scales with it. Governance controls that hold today may not hold next quarter.

The teams that get ahead of this don't run better scans at the build. They move enforcement earlier, automate re-evaluation, and put a platform in place that can handle what AI-speed development actually generates.

If your team has adopted AI coding tools and you haven't yet pressure-tested your artifact governance against the throughput they produce, that's the conversation worth having now.

Book a demo to get the conversation started and to see how Cloudsmith enforces policy at the point of pull.

AI is breaking your artifact governance – and not by writing bad code

The threat research team at Socket have today identified over 84 malicious 

 package artifacts across 42 packages in the 

 has over 12 million weekly downloads - giving you an idea of the global impact of these software dependencies. 

 have attributed the behaviour to an ongoing TeamPCP supply chain attack called “

”. The self-propagating malware, which has been seen in other supply chain attacks, spreads by stealing CI/CD secrets.

Thankfully all of these compromised packages were identified only minutes after the packages were published. The problem for the industry is whether organisations had inadvertently consumed those malicious software artifacts before they were removed from the 

 upstream registry. As always a way that 

 registry users can stay ahead of this type of attack is by defining a 

 registry. In Cloudsmith, we solve this problem through automated 

. Cloudsmith also tracks the malicious packages under the 


Match new packages for a specific period (for example a couple of days) after the package was initially released. By enforcing a time lag before consuming a new package or package version, we are enforcing an effective safeguard to protect against zero-day attacks such as the compromised 


This simple policy checks if a package was part of a supply chain attack. If OSV.dev identifies the package as malicious in their advisories, for example, 

, Cloudsmith registries can automatically quarantine packages that start with the "

 by the TanStack team, the attackers successfully released 84 compromised versions of 42 different 

 packages. The breach was achieved through a multi-step exploit involving "

 workflows, GitHub Actions cache poisoning, and the extraction of OIDC tokens directly from the runner's process memory. Unfortunately, we expect to see more of this style of campaign from groups like TeamPCP in the coming months. As always, there are steps that we can take to stay safe.

Talk to Cloudsmith about protecting your software supply chain →

TanStack npm packages compromised in Mini Shai-Hulud attack

On April 30, 2026, the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign moved beyond npm and into Packagist. Attackers replaced the contents of 

, Intercom's official PHP client, with over 20.7 million lifetime installs, with a credential-stealing payload that executed at install time, before any application code ever called the library. PHP teams, Laravel applications, and continuous integration (CI) pipelines that updated to that version may need to treat affected environments as compromised.

The attack exploited two properties of Packagist that most PHP developers have little reason to question.

Packagist versions are not immutable. The registry mirrors tags from upstream Git repositories, and those tags allow force-updates to point to a different commit. The attacker force-pushed a malicious commit behind the existing 

 tag, replacing a known-good release without changing its version number. Any developer or CI system that ran 

 after 20:53 UTC on April 30 received the compromised artifact, even with an explicit version pin.

 as a Composer plugin, subscribing it to the 

 hooks. Composer ran attacker-controlled code as a natural part of installation so it didn’t require an import. The plugin executed a shell script that downloaded Bun 1.3.13 from GitHub Releases and ran an 11.7 MB obfuscated JavaScript payload called 

 as a background daemon. A legitimate PHP SDK has no business doing any of that.

 harvests credentials broadly: GitHub CLI tokens, npm tokens, SSH private keys, cloud credentials across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Docker registry credentials, Kubernetes configuration, HashiCorp Vault tokens, and 

 files. It also queries cloud secret-management services directly, e.g., AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager, and Kubernetes Secrets.

The payload encrypts stolen data with AES-256-GCM before exfiltrating it to a hardcoded endpoint at 

. If that channel fails, it falls back to GitHub-based exfiltration using any GitHub credentials it has already harvested.

It also carries supply chain propagation logic. Stolen npm tokens let it republish modified packages with injected install-time scripts. It writes payload files into GitHub repositories using commit messages like 

, designed to disappear into normal developer workflows.

The Mini Shai-Hulud Packagist attack follows the same pattern as the 

: a trusted package, a payload injected silently at install time, and a detection window too narrow for teams pulling directly from public registries to rely on.

Cloudsmith sits between your teams and public registries, applying security controls before packages reach build environments or developer machines. Age-based (

) policies would have identified the compromised 

 artifact immediately on publication, blocking it from entering any build until it cleared a configured minimum age threshold. According to internal data, in 2025, 99% of malicious npm packages received official verification within 72 hours. A cooldown policy buys exactly that kind of margin.

Cloudsmith continuously ingests threat intelligence from OSV.dev and the OpenSSF Malicious Packages project. Continuous package enrichment matches cached packages to malicious identifiers. A positive match triggers security policies, which automatically take the prescribed action that users define, e.g., block, quarantine, tag, etc., without requiring manual triage. Routing all Composer requests through Cloudsmith as an upstream proxy also gives your team a full audit trail of which package versions entered your artifact store and when. These are the first questions you need to answer when scoping an incident like this.

If you want to understand how these controls apply to your current Packagist and Composer setup, 

Mini Shai-Hulud reaches Packagist: the intercom/intercom-php compromise explained

Software delivery is often the last, yet frequently neglected, mile of the development lifecycle. For independent software vendors (ISVs), SDK providers, and teams shipping internal tools, the “how” of distribution is just as critical as the “what.” Too often, teams find themselves building and maintaining custom download pages, hosting infrastructure, and complex access controls that add zero value to their core product. These DIY systems are expensive to run, difficult to scale globally, and notoriously easy to misconfigure from a security standpoint.

When software downloads live on generic, third-party domains or lack clear, professional access controls, you risk losing the very thing your product depends on: developer trust. Distribution is an early trust checkpoint for many developers. If a developer hesitates to adopt your software because the delivery method feels disconnected or insecure, you’ve hit a roadblock that slows down your entire adoption funnel.

Software distribution should meet basic expectations for security, access control, and traceability without requiring you to become an infrastructure company. 

Cloudsmith Broadcasts

Broadcasts is Cloudsmith’s built-in, dedicated software distribution capability designed for delivering packages to customers and partners. It allows your team to publish software through secure, branded endpoints hosted under your own domain. Essentially, it acts as a professional front door for your artifacts, abstracting away the headache of building or maintaining custom download portals.

Built on Cloudsmith’s cloud-native architecture, Broadcasts handles the heavy lifting of global scaling and replication. Whether you are distributing a public CLI tool to thousands of developers or a proprietary SDK to a handful of enterprise partners, Broadcasts ensures your software delivery is available, secure, and on brand. It supports both open-source and commercial distribution, and manages access through granular entitlements and seamless integration with native developer tools.

Professional delivery with your own branding

Your brand shouldn’t stop at your documentation page. Many teams struggle with package endpoints that feel disconnected from their identity, leading to confusion and reduced trust among the developer community. Broadcasts solve this by enabling teams to present their distribution experience with their own identity, featuring the same branding, domain, and look and feel that users expect.

By using custom domains and tailored presentation settings, you provide extra reassurance. When a user decides whether to install a package, seeing your company’s domain and branding reinforces that the software is authentic and supported.

Beyond aesthetics, Broadcasts give you control over the technical presentation of your packages. You can configure how to display package information, download links, and license details to end-users. This flexibility ensures that you are providing the exact context a developer needs to successfully integrate your software, all without compromising Cloudsmith’s built-in security and reliability.

Not all software is meant for everyone. Whether you are protecting commercial IP or managing internal tools, Broadcasts provide a range of access models to fit your distribution strategy.

For community tools or public-facing software, public Broadcasts make all packages from a repository openly accessible. This is ideal for increasing the reach of your software without forcing users through unnecessary authentication hurdles.

Protecting proprietary content–like premium SDKs or internal artifacts–is a major challenge for many organizations. Setting up secure, access-controlled methods often requires significant engineering time.

Private Broadcasts provide a dedicated, access-controlled portal where you manage access through secure entitlement tokens. This ensures that only authorized partners or internal teams can view and download your packages. It guarantees robust security, compliance, and IP protection without compromising the end-user experience. You get the security of a private repository with the professional interface of a public one.

The best distribution platform is the one developers don’t have to think about. Developers expect to fetch packages through native tools, whether it’s npm, pip, maven, or a system-level CLI. If your distribution method doesn’t align with these workflows, you create friction that slows down adoption.

Broadcasts are built to integrate directly with native developer tooling. Users can access artifacts through their preferred CLI or CI/CD tools, creating a smooth, workflow-friendly experience. By meeting developers where they already work, you remove the roadblocks that can stall the rollout of new software versions.

Distributing software shouldn’t be a black box. Many teams ship artifacts without knowing which versions users actually download, who is using them, or whether adoption is trending up or down.

Broadcasts include built-in analytics that provide clear visibility into software distribution and adoption. You can track:

: Understand the raw volume of software consumption.

: See which versions are popular and which are being phased out.

: Identify where in the world your users are located.

: Monitor trends over time to predict infrastructure needs or marketing success.

These insights help teams optimize their delivery strategies and understand user behavior more deeply. This data is accessible through both the Cloudsmith web app and the API, allowing you to feed these metrics into your own internal business intelligence tools.

One of the primary differentiators of Broadcasts is its ease of use compared to DIY alternatives. You don’t need to spend weeks designing a portal or configuring web servers.

You can enable a Broadcast instantly from any existing Cloudsmith repository. This immediately creates a professional interface for your end-users without the need for additional infrastructure.

Upload your logo, set your brand colors, and configure your custom domain.

: Navigate to your repository and enable the Broadcast feature.

: Choose between public or private access and generate entitlement tokens for your users if necessary.

: Monitor your performance through the built-in analytics dashboard.

For more information about specific settings, check out the 

The goal of Cloudsmith Broadcasts is to remove the burden of distribution infrastructure. By reducing operational overhead and security risks, Broadcasts help your team stay focused on what matters most: building your core product.

By aligning distribution with your brand identity and providing the tools for secure, manageable access, you can deliver a professional experience that reinforces trust and accelerates adoption. Stop building custom portals and start broadcasting your software with Cloudsmith.

 to discuss your unique distribution needs.

Cloudsmith Broadcasts: Distribute software on your own terms

, with participation from our existing investors, to build the operating system for the modern software supply chain. The timing matters because AI is changing what it means to build software.

We’ve been doing it long enough to see the internet change how we distribute software. We’ve seen open source change how we reuse components. We’ve seen CI/CD change how we build and deploy. We’ve seen cloud change how we run infra. We’ve seen SaaS change how we architect applications.

With each evolution, we expand what developers can achieve and how quickly they can move. We evolve our way of working and the tools we use. AI may be the most consequential evolution yet because it touches every area I just listed.

Developers will always play a central role, even as bots update dependencies, CI/CD systems continuously consume artifacts, agents write code and push changes through systems at a scale that humans can’t manually review at the same pace. Developers know what to build and why, but there’s been a change in the laws of physics for software.

We want developers to move faster. We want teams spending less time fighting infrastructure and more time building things that matter. Our tools must make building software safe, so we trust developers to run at maximum tilt.

Software is becoming easier to create than to trust.

Cloudsmith sits at a critical point in the trust chain. That is why this Series C matters: it gives us the fuel to deliver on that promise at a time when software is becoming easier to create than to trust.

Artifact management was always the control point

When Cloudsmith began, artifact management was still seen as busywork and plumbing - necessary, but boring. You wrote code, pushed packages somewhere, pulled them into another system, and moved on. But Cloudsmith didn’t see it that way.

When you think about how we construct software, source code matters, but really, most software actually exists as “artifacts” - our word for packages, containers, dependencies, metadata, SBOMs, signatures, provenance, and builds.

Artifacts are the threads that connect modern software creation, consumption, governance, and delivery.

Artifact management was seen as repositories, storage, and developer convenience - a place to hold packages. But things have gotten… complicated. The explosion of open-source packages, evolving threats to the software supply chain, and the rise of agentic AI software development have shown that artifacts are, in fact, the critical control point.

Cloudsmithers are true believers. The market has now caught up with that belief.

There were easier ways to build Cloudsmith. But we had the conviction that artifact management is what ultimately mattered most. We chose to focus on the fundamentals: simple by design, secure by default, and genuinely cloud-native. We also chose to build a multi-tenant-only platform that would benefit everyone plugged into it. That was not always the cheapest approach, nor was it always the obvious one. But we believed it was the right one.

Software and AI have entered the age of assembly

Software is assembled far more than it’s authored. We build software by combining ingredients - what developers call “dependencies” - into something useful. The flow of ingredients is what we call the software supply chain. The shift from “write code myself” to “assemble software from components” has been happening for decades; AI agents have accelerated this to a breathtaking scale.

Think of this as the AI software factory - a place where we build pipelines for AI to assemble software. Humans decide what to build and oversee the process. Agents write and change the code. CI/CD systems build and test the components they produce. Partner tools inspect them. Registries and package managers supply additional ingredients. Deployment systems ship the final product.

 that over 1.1 million public repositories import LLM SDKs, with 518 million merged PRs, growing 29% annually. I’m certain that’s accelerated in the past 6 months.

Every dependency use is a trust decision, and every artifact has provenance: where it came from. Every artifact should also have a policy: how it should be used. And every artifact has ownership: who is responsible for it. Because every artifact has a blast radius: what happens if it is vulnerable, malicious, or misconfigured?

These decisions matter, whether you make them explicitly or you just let them happen. We’ve collectively let our guard down when it comes to software supply chain trust, and threat actors know it. Their attacks are increasing, they’re creative and ever-changing, and they’re effective enough that every serious organization has to care.

 in March 2025 affected more than 23,000 code repositories and exposed CI/CD secrets in workflow logs. Axios, one of the npm ecosystem’s most widely used HTTP clients, was 

 (April 2026) through malicious npm releases that deployed a cross-platform Remote Access Trojan (RAT), at a scale of 100 million downloads per week. Those represent huge surface areas of potential impact.

Despite these incidents, we’re going to keep building software using components, and if anything, we’re speeding up. “Don’t use dependencies” isn’t an option. The only viable path is forward - to control the flow of components (we’d say “artifacts” at Cloudsmith).

Automating the control point for the new age

Humans have traditionally been the control surface for the software supply chain. Developers are trained to pull packages from public registries. For example, every Python 101 course teaches “pip install” on the first day, accepting that the default target is PyPI. It’s not until advanced courses (if ever) that developers start asking, “Where exactly do those packages come from, anyway?”

As you assemble teams to build software, you typically add some rigor to dependency management, with manual reviews, metrics, logs, and dashboards. You might already have reactive security scanning that blocks unwanted packages when PRs are merged, at the end of the development process. But that approach no longer scales. To keep up with modern software velocity, teams need automation, along with, by default, machine-enforceable, context-rich guardrails that are fast enough to prevent bottlenecks.

Cloudsmithers are optimistic by nature. We’re not into fear, uncertainty, and doubt. We’re more about clarity, control, and confidence. Clarity means knowing which packages are being used. Control means governing how they move and how they are distributed. Confidence means developers and agents can move fast without breaking trust.

Visibility here matters - we need SBOMs, SCA, and inventory tools to see and understand the software supply chain. But we actually need more than to see the problem space; we need to control it. That’s what makes artifact management so critical to governing the software supply chain.

We say at Cloudsmith that you need visibility to get control, and you need control to get security. Security is ultimately a by-product of strong controls and visibility.

Cloudsmith isn’t an application security tool; we’re infrastructure, and our role in the modern software factory is to serve as the artifact control plane. We sit where software components cross boundaries: from upstreams into the enterprise, from developers into builds, from builds into environments, and beyond. Cloudsmith is where you manage software artifacts, attach metadata, prove provenance, enforce policy, and govern distribution.

Stronger security is a by-product of a stronger underlying control point.

Cloudsmith 2.0: the operating system for the modern software supply chain

Cloudsmith 2.0 is our vision for the operating system of the modern software supply chain. It’s our underlying architecture, and it’s what makes Cloudsmith more than just a registry service for artifacts.

We use the operating system metaphor deliberately because operating systems are foundational. They provide shared primitives and guarantees that make it easier, faster, and safer to build complex systems. The modern software supply chain needs the same thing: artifact identity, metadata, provenance, policy, audit, routing, caching, and delivery, all working together across a global graph of producers, consumers, partners, and ecosystems.

The Cloudsmith 2.0 operating system is built around three core layers:

A record layer that gives you a durable source of truth for artifacts, identity, metadata, and provenance.

A control layer that lets you make fast, enforceable, and auditable decisions.

A delivery layer that distributes software efficiently to your developers, pipelines, and external customers.

Partners can plug data, signals, workflows, and expertise into those layers, while customers build their own software supply chain workflows on top. Together, those layers turn artifact management into a shared data and control plane, where components are governed and delivered at web scale.

Cloudsmith is built for this because we are global, cloud-native, and multi-tenant by design. Our DNA is different from legacy, per-installation, single-tenant registry architecture that dominated the artifact management space before we came along. The Cloudsmith 2.0 operating system means package health intelligence, actionable feedback, data pre-computation, and fast policy decisions compound across the ecosystem.

A big benefit of Cloudsmith 2.0 is that more work can be done in advance. Artifacts are ingested, canonicalized, enriched, stored, and linked before they are requested. Actionable policy decisions happen quickly because the system already has the data. Software delivery is more predictable with a platform built on global routing, caching, and connectivity.

That’s pretty technical, but the outcomes are clear: safer, faster software, at any scale. One signal protects many customers. Each trusted record reduces duplicated work. A unified control plane helps cross-functional, distributed teams make better trust decisions and consume software with the right evidence and controls.

Accelerating Cloudsmith’s vision with partners, investors, and customers

Our Series C financing is fuel for the mission we’ve been on since we started.

We will accelerate Cloudsmith 2.0, with AI-native workflows, stronger software supply chain controls, a deeper automated policy engine, richer provenance and insights, package-aware delivery and connectivity, and more pluggability with partner tools.

Cloudsmith believes in partnerships. Surprisingly, this is still a fairly radical notion in the artifact management market. But we just don’t think any one vendor will supply the definitive scanner, CI/CD pipelines, security data source, and workflow tooling an enterprise needs. The better approach is an open control plane where partners combine their signals, workflows, and expertise into a central software component control point.

“Docker has always been where developers build and ship software, and security has to be the default, not an afterthought. Docker Hardened Images and Docker Hardened System Packages set a new standard for trusted containers. With Cloudsmith, enterprises can manage those hardened components at scale and deliver secure software without friction."

“Cloudsmith has become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the modern SDLC - the cloud-native artifact registry that replaces legacy tools and actually scales with how enterprises ship software. Our joint customers integrate it with Endor Labs for malicious package firewalling, function-level reachability, and automated remediation. That combination is powerful for securing the AI coding era.”

 – Varun Badhwar, Founder and CEO, Endor Labs

“Cloudsmith has been a great partner with Aikido. We're both re-inventing what it means to secure the software supply chain. We're seeing Cloudsmith a lot more in our customer base, and they're great to work with.”

 — Roeland Delrue, Co-founder and COO, Aikido

Software supply chain attacks, regulatory pressure, and enterprise platform consolidation make artifact management a board-level concern.

Enterprises see artifact management platforms as the crucial enabler of engineering speed, security control, compliance evidence, and software trust.

Our lead investors, TCV and Insight Partners, understand that shift. They invested in our Series B last year, and we’re grateful for their growing belief and conviction:

“Having led Cloudsmith’s Series B and now its Series C, TCV is proud to deepen our partnership with a company we see as defining artifact management for the AI era. As AI shapes the software supply chain, we believe Cloudsmith is uniquely positioned to become a platform enterprises rely on for compliance, control, and security at global scale.”

“In an era increasingly defined by AI-driven development, securing the software supply chain is critical. As a cloud-native offering, Cloudsmith is well-positioned to do this – providing the scale and reliability needed to power enterprise and AI-driven builds and mitigate emerging risks. We believe in Cloudsmith’s vision to secure the software supply chain by serving as a curated, AI-ready solution for enterprises of all sizes.”

 — Thomas Krane, Managing Director, Insight Partners

. We’re serving a rapidly growing range of technology and software companies, AI startups, mid-market companies, and mainstream enterprises. They all want a software supply chain that’s fast enough for developers, safe enough for security teams, clear enough for audit and compliance, scalable enough to keep up with their ambitions, and simple enough that it just works.

Cloudsmith just works - whether it’s failover, automation, or support. It’s the first platform we’ve used that feels like a true partner in how we build and operate software.

We’d like to think that the best infrastructure companies are ahead of their time, and that the foundations Cloudsmith laid down years ago are paying off today.

In the compiler era, we converted human intent into reliable software. In the cloud era, we operated software at a global scale for the first time. In the AI era, we need to figure out how to use and trust software that’s created, assembled, and changed faster than humans can manually inspect or even fully understand.

Cloudsmith is here to help answer that question.

When we started, artifact management was not a sexy part of developer infrastructure. It was seen as low value. Open source was ‘free’. But we could see the risks emerging as more and more software teams increasingly relied on packages, registries, and automation. That dependency is now massive, and so is our responsibility.

A heartfelt thank you to our customers. You’ve trusted Cloudsmith, sometimes before it was obvious why our software category was so important. You’ve consistently pushed us to build better because you rely on us for critical infrastructure, engineering, security, and platform workflows. We take that responsibility seriously.

Every Cloudsmither can take pride in our passion for our craft and in the hard work that has made Cloudsmith the company it is today - a special place. The market is pulling toward the problems we set out to solve from the beginning. This is our moment, and it’s time to earn it.

We’re by developers, for developers, and we always have been. We feel a kinship with the builders, platform teams, security professionals, and enterprise leaders who want to build safely in the age of AI. Because software is becoming easier to create than to trust.

We’ve got Cloudsmith 2.0 and the future of the software supply chain to build.

Check out press coverage, a video from our leadership team, and a note from our investors

Learn about our Series C

We built Cloudsmith for this moment

 have identified a new software supply chain attack on the 

”. A series of malicious packages are masquerading as a new AI coding agent called 

, the malicious package was reported minutes after being identified as containing a malicious payload on the 

 community did a great job in removing these suspicious packages from the registry so quickly, the 

 advisories weren’t able to classify these packages in time. But that’s okay, since they have successfully been removed and pose no threat right now.

OSM scanned the binaries, and the payload appears to be infostealers focused on cloud and AI credential harvesting across 

 storage. These payloads are adjusted for Windows and MacOS environments. A list of 

As always, if you’re a Cloudsmith user, you can apply age-based (

) policies to block newly published packages. In the case of the stardrop campaign, the malicious npm packages were all removed less than a day after the campaign began.

 is one of the most effective ways to stop this class of attack, giving security researchers (like our friends at OSM) time to identify the suspicious payload. In 2025, 

99% of malicious npm packages were identified and officially verified within 72 hours

, so implementing a simple cooldown policy significantly reduces this kind of attack vector.

Stardrop: New cross-industry npm campaign

By submitting this form, you agree to our 

Answer twenty questions about your artifact and supply chain practices. Get a custom report card showing your maturity score against key regulatory and compliance frameworks.

Artifact Security Maturity Assessment

Any organization manufacturing, importing, or distributing products with digital elements in the EU, including commercial software, SaaS, IoT devices, and connected hardware. Note that CRA open source software exemptions only apply to non-commercial projects; commercial use puts you in scope.

Who does the Cyber Resilience Act apply to? 

On September 11, 2026, vulnerability reporting obligations go live; manufacturers must report actively exploited vulnerabilities to ENISA within 24 hours, even for products already on the market. December 11, 2027, is the full compliance deadline, covering all remaining CRA software requirements, including SBOMs, secure-by-design, CE marking, and technical documentation for any new product placed on the EU market.

What is the difference between the 2026 and 2027 CRA deadlines? 

Yes. The CRA requires manufacturers to produce and maintain a software bill of materials for every product. Even though the formal SBOM mandate is part of the December 2027 deadline, you effectively need it before September 2026, because accurate component-level visibility is a prerequisite for meeting the 24-hour vulnerability reporting obligation. An SBOM generation tool integrated into your build pipeline is the most practical starting point.

Do I need an SBOM to comply with CRA? 

Start by integrating SBOM generation into your CI/CD pipeline and establishing continuous vulnerability monitoring across your product portfolio. From there, enforce artifact repository policies to prevent non-compliant components from entering your builds, and document your vulnerability-handling process before the September 2026 reporting deadline. The CRA effectively makes DevSecOps practices a legal requirement, not just a best practice.

Cloudsmith Blog

The EU Cyber Resilience Act: What engineering teams need to do to be compliant

The Miasma worm's path of destruction

What is a package cooldown policy? How to prevent malicious dependencies from entering your environment.

From trusted artifact to controlled deployment: Cloudsmith and Octopus Deploy

How artifact management closes the gaps that leave you exposed under the CRA

EU CRA compliance: building a defensible posture with Cloudsmith

Cloud Native Digest - May 2026