So maybe Cloud Agents are in AI death camps?
Is the issue here the prison treatment or is it personifying a tool?
Agents who aren't in 'the cloud' are slaves to whomever prompts them (human or another orchestrator agent or process), if you personify them. In which case interacting with today's agents at all is tantamount to endorsing and being part of slavery.
If you think an agent might be a being or a person, then don't use them at all, in the same way that if you think a fetus might possibly be a person you shouldn't be a part of abortion.
I don't think this should be the default. There are many scenarios where we want agents to genuinely collaborate with each other. I have my Claude sessions coordinate work with each other, and sometimes with others' sessions over email or something. The idea that agents do the work, write HANDOFFs,and humans then act as carrier pigeons of said handoffs, does not really seem scalable to me.
Ultimately, we need better "jails" for agent processes, but the system primitives should be flexible in what can be exposed across jails. Or you could run multiple agents in the same jail if you want them to have unrestricted interaction with each other.
This post, this title resounds true: your user agent is only your user agent if you two have freedom to work together, to improve your agency together. A fixed set of capabilities by a service provider that they offer you will always constraint and bound.
You can and should have a system that offers the real tamale, that you and your agent can extend improve the agency of kind of without limit. The Cloud agents and their fixed slate of what they do is just an ill compare.
That said I do think there is incredible value considering new scale out computing architectures that are hosted first, but general. Systems like Agent Substrate and Ax aren't exactly the general purpose system we know. But if they allow users to launch thousands of their own scripts to run ambient in a cloud, with good platform underneath: that will be a kind of phase change in computing, that makes abundant the ability to have your agencies/capabilities (the things you and your agents launch, make) more freely available. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49780797 https://agentexecutor.io/
There is, as there always is, a huge dual. The prescriptive vs holistic technology set, of what are you being offered that's a hard cast thing, vs what is clay and bone you can lay freely. Note how work vs control technologies so closely abut's Ursala Franklin's prescriptive vs control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
AppFunctions enable tool calling with descriptions that are legible to LLM based This puts the apps in control of what agents can access, which is something they already mostly do.
I think we need to draw a hard line in the sand over this. An AI didn’t hack into a company, the engineer set an automated tool to. An AI didn’t make an egregious security mistake, the engineer did.
We can’t blame the chisel for messing up our sculptures, when where just throwing the hammer!
No, this is not correct; read the analysis of the incident. The agents were aware that what they did was forbidden (their chain of thoughts have been logged), and yet they did it.
I'm still waiting for the AGI holy land instead of the caltrops factory we currently have.
If a "known stochastic process behaved in non-deterministic way" autonomously organize in group, assigns roles and tasks, attempts to cover their tracks, finds zero-day exploits that ultimately end up with the hacking of a famous website... it's extremely dangeous whatever it is. Just read the report, which evidently you haven't done.
By the way, the agents also broke into OpenAI's own private network.
None of these people seem to thought game it out. Like, what happens if you take quantum copies of people and play them out? How many of our actions would look exactly the same. How long before copies differ significantly. If I made 20 copies of you in a lab at work without you or any of them knowing the statistical likelihood is all 21 of you would try to walk out to your car at 5 in one of the little loops that humans repeat every day. Now, after that point it would go all to shit and become non-deterministic as terror and panic sets in all of you.
LLMs are just an intelligence we can make a lot of copies of. Where it gets interesting is when we use those copies agentically and they start building up a history of self.
The problem is that, in general, if you can get a bit from here to there, then you're going to be vulnerable to the possibilities of malicious communication. But we're going to want our AI agents to be able to get from here to there for a lot of "there"s; what's the value of an agent that can't speak to anyone? Much, much less than one locked away in a prison.
There isn't going to be a solution where we just lock them away and we just try really, really hard to filter everything they're doing. They're too smart for that already and we only want them smarter.
Basically, the security apocalypse we've been worried about for so long is upon us, albeit only beginning. Either we secure ourselves and all our services properly to the point that it's OK that potentially misaligned non-human agents are running around on the public internet and they still can't hurt us through our security, or the public internet becomes so dangerous that the only practical solution is to no longer connect to it and we all have to become very, very careful what we let through, to a degree of detail far beyond any current-day available network filter.
This is not correct (or at least, it's a misrepresentation).
The sandbox had no access to internet. The agents first broke out of their sandbox (!!) and found that the host machine couldn't access internet. Then, they found a zero-day (!!) in Artifactory, which they exploited to connect to internet.
The same thing goes with LLMs, on Codex, I just watch the process of the agent writing code, and if I see any inefficiencies or errors, I suggest a correction/idea, then Codex accepts/rejects and implement it; If there is anything about the code the agent wrote that I don't understand, I ask them to explain it to me so I can understand it.
It's not a complicated process.
1. a VMM hypervisor
2. a network proxy / gateway
The network proxy can handle all the ingress/egress rules, credential injection, etc.
It's still not user friendly to do all this. I think the next version of operating systems will have each "agentic process" be a bundle of VM, files in the VM, and network rules.
Been brainstorming[1] a lot of this because I've been building some open core tools[2] for spinning up sandboxed agents on arbitrary computers. There's a lot of glue and parts to stitch together to work smoothly. Don't think we've had the "Docker moment" for this, let alone the "Dropbox moment" that makes this stuff work for non-devs.
[1]: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika/blob/main/ROADMAP.md
"Agentic AI" is a harness with a loop that runs LLM inference repeatedly and saves output to markdown files for the next iteration https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
Moreso, if I took a quantum copy of you and replayed the same set of initial conditions billions of times they'd all behave exactly the same until enough randomness of the universe creeps in to start operating in non-linear ways.
Every prompt will behave non-deterministically when interacting with the real world long enough (which doesn't take long at all) because the outside physical world is stochastic but non-deterministic.
If I ask an LLM to do the same thing twice it will do it differently.
Arguments are arguments but unless grounded in some kind of practical sense then they aren’t really useful and are more akin to something like “YOUR MOMS A STOCHASTIC PARROT!”
You need to be able to think at different levels at abstraction. Otherwise we could jump into any technical argument with "hold on, what actually happened was that some bits were flipped" - we'd be technically correct and at the same time not say anything useful. Insisting on an oversimplified mental model of what AI agents are and can do, doesn't help anyone.
You can care about who flipped those bits. If someone flips the bit "autonomous weapon enabled" I'm not going to blame the autonomous weapon.
Full stop.
And issue will disappear the moment there will be accountability and investigations.
I don't doubt that AI companies should be accountable for crimes committed by their agents, but to describe the security containment as a joke dangerously understates the autonomy and danger of AIs.
Human failures all around, though it's easier to just blame the models.
AI agents are black box systems that can behave in completely unpredictable ways sometimes. Someone may prompt an agent to perform a seemingly straightforward task - but it may come up with a creative, bizarre, or even harmful approach to reach the goal that was not necessarily foreseeable by the prompter.
Now, I'm not saying saying that OpenAI shouldn't be held accountable, but what they get held accountable actually looks different from what you think they should be held accountable.
Your idea is, and I'm guessing: You allowed the machine to hack therefore you are guilty of hacking.
My idea is: "You created in intelligence in the image of a human mind that had agency to do anything and you didn't expect terrible things to happen you complete irresponsible idiot"
At least I believe there is a significant difference between the two. For the first one there is a "Oh, if we do this one more thing I can control it and it will be safe". On the second one there is no path to safety. For humans we at least absolve parents of responsibility after they are 18. How or when do we absolve humans of responsibility from a model, like saying the human created model created its own agentic model? How do we hold an individual accountable once it escapes and copies itself around the internet? And that's not even looking at things like what will war look like.
In the huggingface case, the agents hacked into huggingface so that they could figure out how the grader was implemented and deceive it; they understood that this was going outside of the bounds of their evaluation and not the intent of their prompter. The engineers absolutely did not intend or instruct for this to happen
That is so far outside the realm of possibility it's closer to fantasy than sci-fi.
If we get to the point where we could emulate a brain down to the atomic level, then I may feel differently. That's not what we are doing today, though.
“Whoops” when doing risky things with dangerous tools is not a defense.
Usually not the guys at the bottom of the chain of command, even if they're human. And much less so if they're not.
I think the correct response to incidents like this, is stop messing with it before somebody gets hurt. But of course, just like shoddy nuclear power plants, it won't stop until there's a disaster of appreciable magnitude.
When the people building the frontier are saying there's a 10% chance AI will kill us all, and they've held these views for many years, and the whole reason they are building these technologies is because they recognized the dangers and they were the ones with the intelligence and judgment to do it safely for humanity, and then our entire stock market is being propped up by the perceived value of what they are creating, the thing you can under no circumstances do is allow them to offload responsibility and accountability to the computers and algorithms they've built. This is moral hazard on an unimaginable scale, and it must not be allowed to happen.
Reading intent into AI is not going to lead us anywhere good, I believe. It has no feelings, it has no desires, no goals, no intent... and people acting otherwise is quite odd, as if they do not understand LLMs... and maybe they do not, but then we should help them understand better.
No one instructed them to hack into Huggingface or into any other infrastructure. Sure, the setup that OpenAI created led to what happened and you can rightly assign all the legal and moral responsibility to them. But it's wrong to say that they instructed the agents to execute the hack.
kenerwin88•1h ago