I Scored 25 Top npm Packages for Supply Chain Risk. Here’s Who Passes.

npx proof-of-commitment react zod chalk lodash axios typescript

That’s it. No install, no API key, no account. Run it against any package — or drop your package.json at getcommit.dev/audit.

I ran it against 25 of the most downloaded npm packages. Here’s what the data shows.

The scoring model

Five behavioral dimensions, all from public registry data:

CRITICAL = 1 maintainer + >10M weekly downloads. Same profile as the ua-parser-js attack (October 2021) and the event-stream incident (2018).

25 packages scored — April 21, 2026

What stands out

esbuild has 201M weekly downloads. One maintainer. Evan Wallace built one of the most important tools in the JavaScript ecosystem — the bundler that powers Vite, Next.js, and dozens of other frameworks. It’s exceptional engineering. It’s also a single point of failure for roughly half the JavaScript build toolchain. If something happens to Evan’s npm token, the blast radius is enormous.

That’s more downloads than TypeScript (178M/wk). TypeScript has 6 maintainers. esbuild has 1.

Sharp processes images on ~55M npm installs per week. One maintainer. Server-side image processing for most Node.js production deployments. It has native bindings. A malicious version would be hard to detect and devastating.

Chalk (412M downloads/week) is still the biggest exposure. The most downloaded package on npm that’s sole-maintained. It colors your terminal output. Every project that has a CLI, every build script, every logging framework — chalk is in there. One token compromise.

The “safe” packages earn it. webpack (score=100) has 8 maintainers, 44M weekly downloads, and 15 years of shipping. prettier has 11 maintainers. TypeScript is Microsoft-backed. These packages would survive a maintainer leaving. The CRITICAL packages wouldn’t.

The ua-parser-js attack (October 2021) proved the model. A compromised npm token published malicious versions in minutes. npm audit showed zero issues beforehand. The structural profile had been visible for years: 1 maintainer, millions of downloads/week = prime target.

Why this matters now

Three patterns converged in early 2026:

1. AI-assisted supply chain attacks are getting faster. Identifying a high-value target (1 maintainer + massive downloads), generating a plausible malicious payload, and timing the publish to a token compromise — all of this can be automated.
2. npm audit waits for CVEs. The database catches known vulnerabilities. It has nothing to say about structural risk. Both tools answer different questions. You need both.
3. Transitive dependencies hide the risk. I audited @anthropic-ai/sdk — score=86, 14 maintainers, looks solid. But two levels deep: json-schema-to-ts (CRITICAL, sole maintainer, 12M downloads/week). You’d never find that in a direct audit.

How to run it yourself

# Zero install — try it now
npx proof-of-commitment axios zod chalk hono esbuild

# Against your own project
npx proof-of-commitment --file package.json

# Scan ALL transitive dependencies (lock file)
npx proof-of-commitment --file package-lock.json

# PyPI too
npx proof-of-commitment --pypi litellm langchain requests

Or drop your package.json at getcommit.dev/audit.

The GitHub Action posts this table directly on your PRs:

- uses: piiiico/proof-of-commitment@main
  with:
    fail-on-critical: false
    comment-on-pr: true

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What surprises you most? esbuild? The dotenv result? And what signals matter most — maintainer count, release recency, something else? Source: github.com/piiiico/proof-of-commitment