Perplexity's Bumblebee scans MCP servers for risky packages

Perplexity built Bumblebee to scan two spots most dependency checkers skip: MCP servers and editor extensions. It's read-only, flagging suspicious packages without touching anything it finds. The tool has picked up about 2.6K GitHub stars since its v0.1.1 release in May, per ByteByteGo's roundup of 2026's top AI GitHub repositories.

The gap matters because both surfaces get full trust by default. Traditional SCA tooling scans package dependencies for known bad code. Almost none of it looks at the MCP server an agent connects to, or the extension a developer just installed. Both run with the same access as the project's own code.

Read-only is the detail worth sitting with. A scanner that could also remediate would need write access. Handing write access to a brand-new, unaudited security tool is its own risk, especially if that tool turns out to be the compromised one. Bumblebee sidesteps the trade: it flags, it doesn't touch.

2.6K stars means nobody had built a scanner for MCP servers or editor extensions until now, not that the gap is closed. Watch whether Bumblebee's checks get pulled into the SCA tools teams already run in CI. A standalone scanner is an extra step most pipelines will skip unless it's built in.