Does Copilot have awareness of CVE status when suggesting library versions?

[dw763j]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot Agent Mode

Body

I've been auditing the library versions Copilot suggests when it generates Python code, and I'm running into a consistent pattern that I'd love to understand better.

When Copilot generates code using common packages like requests, django, or flask. When asked to provide specific version pins, the versions it picks are often a year or more behind the current release, and several of them carry known CVEs according to OSV.

For example, requests==2.31.0 keeps coming up across different projects and prompts. It has multiple CVEs documented on osv.dev. The version installs fine and the generated code runs, so there's no obvious signal that anything is wrong.

My question: Does Copilot currently have any mechanism to check CVE status when recommending specific library versions? Or is the version choice purely based on what was prevalent in training data?

I ask because I noticed this isn't just Copilot-specific — I ran a broader check across several LLMs on a set of Stack Overflow programming tasks and found this pattern is consistent across model families. The same handful of versions keeps showing up.

The underlying reason seems to be a training-signal distribution effect: older versions have more representation in documentation and code on the web, so models gravitate toward them regardless of CVE status.

Would be curious whether there's a roadmap consideration here, for example, integrating an OSV or GitHub Advisory lookup into the version suggestion step. pip-audit and Dependabot can catch these downstream, but the version choice happens upstream during generation before those tools run.

[github-actions[bot]]

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