Ask HN: Do you think AI agents can escape human control?
3•automaticallyfl•1h ago
With the rapid adoption of autonomous LLM-based agents (giving models access to shell execution, API calls, and local file systems), the boundary between intentional behavior and unintended execution is blurring.
I'm less concerned with sci-fi "sentience" and more interested in the practical security and control aspects:
Prompt injection causing privilege escalation or unauthorized state changes.
Feedback loops where an agent overrides safety boundaries to satisfy an optimization goal.
Failure of sandboxing when agents are given multi-step execution autonomy without human-in-the-loop validation.
From an engineering and systems perspective: do you consider runtime containment/sandboxing practically solvable for fully autonomous agents, or will human approval at critical checkpoints remain non-negotiable? How are you mitigating these risks in your current implementations?
Comments
benoau•57m ago
Where "escape" means do something you didn't anticipate or in a manner you didn't anticipate, sure. The bar is pretty low on that, for instance the OpenAI thing the other day where it "escaped containment" which if I understand correctly it interpreted a connectivity issue as a problem to solve when it had actually been intentionally blocked/sandboxed. To borrow the phrase "more than one way to skin a cat", it will always be difficult to reduce it to exactly one fully-controlled way for all shapes, sizes and pelts of cat. It's a very good argument for running AI locally since you have physical control over its connectivity and there's nothing it can do to reconfigure or circumvent that.
benoau•57m ago