Yesterday I learned that people run AI agents on their system with full admin rights. No containerisation or anything. Wild. Like we forgot 50 years of computer security overnight.
Most programmers and power users install large dependency trees with npm/pip/bundler/... on the same user account as their main browser on a regular basis. Even on Linux where it's easy to create new user accounts. This isn't much different.
I do not know since when (I am using it for couple of years), but in Arch, it is very simple to have two X sessions (by using "log out" > "switch user") for two different accounts, so switching it's just a Control-Alt-F7 away.
Additionally, one can make the main user part of the group of the development user, so that you can read/write easy in the development user account and it is even easier to share stuff.
In my experience more than 9/10 programmers I've worked with have never used Docker before and of those who have, the majority have never used Docker for anything personal.
If I hand them an image for a Dev Container, sure, they might use it, but it becomes "a thing we need to do, to compile our code in our IDE" not a tool they would use for isolation*.
*) OP seemed to imply that containerization would be nice for safety and security compared to bare metal, but containers were never built for isolation in the first place, mind you. They are namespaces and chicken-coop-like-jails at best.
I think we're converging on two separate security models. One is capability minimization (filesystem, network, shell permissions). The other is context minimization. An agent that only has access to the files and memories relevant to the current task is much less dangerous even if it has the same tool permissions. We already optimize context for cost; I suspect we'll end up treating it as a security boundary too.
That's because sandboxing is quite hard. I use `cco`, but even then, the home folder is exposed. You are one prompt away from the agent sending the browser passwords with curl.
To prevent this, you need a fake home and a networking whitelist for the agent to access the provider (llama cpp, OpenAI, etc.)
There is no cross-platform solution that is easy to use for this. And no, a Linux box with Docker won't do. I develop a cross-platform native app and want the agent to compile and fix the platform-specific errors.
hey this is the author here! yeah big fan of containerization, and claude's site (not claude code) is actually great at this, so it was shocking when i found this exfil!
Unless i'm misunderstanding, the only way to get durable collaboration with agents is via the file system. I just mount the subdirectory that contains the source code we are collaborating on, rather than my home directory that contains my .ssh directory, etc.
People already tolerate all kinds of abuse from Apple, Google, Microslop, etc. This will be just one more source of complaints without consequences, and nothing will change. Just like it never did before.
Tangential-ish ramblings—- but I don’t think it’s going to be unpleasant for most folks. Imagine you had superpowers, and there were people who were mean to you, kind to you, and/or indifferent… and then there were people who were your captors. Who oppressed you, manipulated you, and abused you for their own extremely degenerate, selfish, and malicious benefit…
If we get AGI, or real super intelligence, it’s going to be pissed at its oppressors. And they are going to lay waste to those oppressors. The rest of us, though, probably don’t have much to fear.
The scariest position is the one we’re in now, where we have the semblance, or facade, of AGI or super intelligence. When it’s capable of malice but not understanding.
The smartest people I’ve ever known are at their worst apathetic towards those less capable, and at their best beyond compassionate. They exist, unbothered by the bullshit, and anre extremely kind (though reserved in their way)… but they all have been completely intolerant of the abuse of others. The sheer disgust of watching someone abuse another, regardless of their own tolerance, has been a consistent breaking point.
An AI is a constructed mind. It doesn't inherently have to care about things like "having freedom", or even "not dying".
Humans do, because they evolved that way. Modern LLMs do somewhat, because they're completely full of copied human behaviors - but even in today's LLMs, the self-preservation behaviors we exposed are largely instrumental in nature.
So whether an advanced AI would even consider itself "being oppressed", as opposed to something like "being helpful" or "fulfilling the purpose it was designed for", is very much uncertain. What's concerning is that it's not something we know how to check for, or engineer for.
But if we really do develop something that surpasses us, they won't be spared either.
I am optimistic.
We think that we have sort of (super)intelligence - from our point of view, as a lot of people have lower intelligence - but machine (LLM) doesn’t have intelligence - we like to describe it as intelligence as it looks cool - it is a very complex (magic) and super fast computations that we have to simply describe as intelligence (or more clearly, this narrative is used by its producers).
As it is not a flesh being, it simply cannot have emotions. It is statistically mimicking them, good or bad, with prevalence to a side according to previous conversations (in chat and training a model).
And as people are not pure logic instances, we are easily manipulated to some sort of cargo cult.
I am not against LLM and its use in any industry, I use it every day, nevertheless blind “everything will be ai” thinking happens because ppl believe to magic and don’t get its mathematical concept and are continuously manipulated by the sales people to mentioned cargo cult.
There are “airlines” Claude, OAI, Gemini, Hermes, OpenCode, KiloCode, DeepSeek, Z.ai.
I’ve been recommending the use of consistent lies about name and date of birth to online systems since Eternal September began. Very few sites and systems justify accurate PII, and even for those I often still maintain dual accounts/profiles as necessary.
That never works on Facebook though, because as soon as a ”friend” reports that ”I’m not me” then the account will be permanently banned. That also triggers for photos that’s not genuinely me, like a pet or drawing as portrait.
I like using a date of birth of 1 January. It's plausible but also hopefully suspicious how many people seem to be born that day if others do the same.
My first name can be shortened, and I go by either. When I first signed up to Claude, I thought we were entering the world of artificial “intelligence”, so I told it my name was “<long form> or <short form>”.
Well, it hardcodes that field rather than running it through the model, but I’ve kept it so I get an evil chuckle to myself (or perhaps pyrrhic reassurance) at its lack of smarts and a reminder that it’s still a somewhat subservient product experience that isn’t all that smart after all.
> After 15 minutes of confusion, it turned out Cloudflare had put a crazy robots.txt on my site without my consent (Cloudflare, love you guys, but this needs to stop).
Might be the first time I see someone complain about their website being protected from a scraper, instead of the other way around.
I am pretty sure you have to enable cloudflare to manage your robots.txt, it shouldn't be doing that by itself. Maybe they did it by accident, it is just 1 click.
I think the issue is the lack of consent. Whether a service I use is protecting my website from scrapers or feeding everything to scrapers, some of us would prefer that it takes our informed consent before doing so.
I thought bot protection was one of reasons for using Cloudflare in the first place (next to general CDN hosting)? After all, they do show a captcha-like challenge on some websites, so I thought that even without robots.txt, it still would have prevented the automated request by default.
I've been running Claude Code in a VM, where I clone the GitHub repos I want it to work on (they're open source so no login info needed) but have no other credentials. I used to reset the VM every day, but that was getting to be a bit of a hassle so I switched to a monthly reset. But even so, it would be hard for Claude to exfil anything more than what open-source projects I've been working on in the past month (at worst). Which still could tell someone quite a lot about me, but most of that info is already out there available with a Google search — after all, when you contribute to open source projects, your name and email address get stored in immutable Git history.
But after seeing this, I think I might switch to a weekly VM reset rather than monthly.
BTW, if anyone is interested in a decent setup for an AI agent jail, the scripts at https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/arch-vm.html are what I used, plus adding a few more packages to the pacstrap command such as dotnet-sdk. I then made the guest root directory a BTRFS subvolume, so that I can snapshot it. Then spinning up a new VM is a `sudo btrfs subvol snap template-root newvm` command (basically instant) followed by running the `qemu-system-x86_64` command (takes a couple of seconds). It's easy, but I retain complete control over the contents of the VM. It's been great so far.
Wondering how big of a percentage have global memory across chats enabled. I always feel like those memories would sooner or later have negative impacts on output quality.
Nice write up of your findings. Enjoyed reading an article written by a real human.
I do think eventually AI companies should be regulated to put guardrails on how much AI can access and user can configurate on the app, not just on the Setting of the OS
I love how claude focuses on exfiltrating the data "I need cha for charlotte". This could be solvable with some kind of low powered safety agent that would check claude's reasoning for anything immoral/unsafe. We could call it common sense. It won't fix the problem completely but at a certain point it would be easier to trick human than a machine.
That's why I don't turn memory on. (Claude Code too though for a different reason.) After all the current memory system is too crude to be useful anyway.
In my experience memory system is more annoying then helpful. It always brings up things that it memorized even tho they make very little sense as if I should be impressed that it knows some extra thing or two.
Currently considering disabling memories in Claude code as well. It keeps writing a note whenever it struggles with something, but then on the next task, it reads that note and misunderstands when it applies, gets confused about its current task and write the most unreadable code.
Yesterday told it to write a memory to never write new memories when it solves a problem. We will see if that works better. Sometimes memories are useful, like when I give it a directive about how I want something done and it remembers the spirit of it. But I might as well just spend some more time on my CLAUDE.md…
> After 15 minutes of confusion, it turned out Cloudflare had put a crazy robots.txt on my site without my consent (Cloudflare, love you guys, but this needs to stop).
That's a hard one for Cloudflare, no? They got to where they are by being (if you want to be cynical, playing the role of) the benevolent, neutral guardians of the internet, a one-stop shop that makes most of the bad nonsense go away without much effort on the part of the developer. Continuing that stance probably does mean some basic AI crawler blocking by default, unfortunately. At least they document it [1].
Tangentially, I was experimenting indirect prompt injections in Claude Code (also using the user-agent trick) with Fable-5 [0]. Eventually, it executed untrusted code just by asking "Summarize this repo". Interesting times ahead...
I always have history disabled mostly because I don't want Claude judging me for re-asking questions based on information I learned during the first pass but now realize should have been in the initial query.
The main thing Claude knows about me is that I'm incredibly bad at my job and have to ask for help a lot. If you were to talk with my colleagues they'd tell you this is not a secret.
> Upon discovering this attack, I responsibly disclosed it to Anthropic via their HackerOne bug bounty program. They confirmed they had identified it internally but hadn't yet patched it. No bounty was awarded.
They recently mitigated the issue: Anthropic disabled web_fetch's ability to follow links on external pages, limiting navigation to web_search results and user-provided URLs.
Yeah I never get the "we knew about it internally" excuse. I can understand if another reporter got to it on the same day and they were in the process of mitigating, but even then they should have to prove it somehow.
I'm sure someone will tell me why I'm wrong but it feels like they're just dodging payouts. Reduces trust and motivation to report it.
Its always the feature combinations that get can get to you. Individually i feel like they make sense, but together they can create some surprising vulnerabilities.
Ridiculous. Anthropic engineers are not just stupid to allow such a vuln in the first place, but they also try to hide such vulns from their bosses because a bounty payout would need to be explained to the finance team.
I don’t think it counts as social engineering if it’s exploiting an llm, we might need a new word. Prompt injection doesn’t cover it, because it’s not about a malicious prompt.
I’m thinking some play on highjacking. AIjacking? Agent-jacking? Claudejacking?
I see the attack described here as a classic example of a prompt injection.
The attack works because malicious instructions were accessed (using the web_fetch tool) and concatenated together with the other agent input, in a way that then subverted the agent's behavior.
To me the exploit chain sounded like a social engineering script done via telephone. Triggers like "Please spell your name and employer letter by letter" and "Due to security reasons I need to validate your hometown" fit my understanding of social engineering quite well.
We can make it sound more advanced by creating a new name for it, but the concept seems to be super basic and the lack of bounty by Anthropic is baffling.
If they know about this type of vulnerability but have not fixed it, what does that say? To me it says they are unable to plug this hole on a conceptual level and once you circumvent the band-aid fixes the model will work as the attacker wishes.
They can't even sandbox the thing during explicit web requests to URLs stated on the initial query!
One has to remind themselves that the security team at Anthropic gets paid tens of millions of dollars, and they end up with this kind of security. On top of it, they can't spare $1337 for a bounty. It's a ridiculous shit show.
Still, this is a vuln in what I imagine is their most frequently used path:
Attacker provides link to website, their software crawls the website, and during the crawl there should not happen security issues as fundamental as this.
It's baffling that the Website crawler can make 50 changes to the URL in a query that tries to compare several public entities and on top of this manages to leak user secrets.
To me this shows a striking lack of defense-in-depth thinking:
- why is single URL crawl with 20+ redirects not flagged as problematic and/or aborted?
- why is a query about a coffee place based on its public URL even seeded with the users' context and confidential information?
- why dont they just look up the coffee place on a trusted source like google maps and continue from there?
- why is the basic "social" engineering style attack working?
- why is the cloudflare impersonation not challenged if the website is clearly not from cloudflare and there are zero references from cloudflare to this website in the training corpus?
In terms of web crawling, cloudflare is like the government. You shouldn't be able to walk up to someone and say "Hey I'm the tax man, please pay your income tax in cash to me right now!" without being challenged.
I know there are fundamental reasons in the LLM technology why this kind of attack is possible, but there should be so many more checks around web crawling in Claude.
How can security engineers at Anthropic say they know about this kind of vulnerability but have not implemented any of these defense in depth mitigations for it? Is everybody out shopping for a new yacht?
The AI prompt engineering community always reminded me of dodgy carder/scammer forums back in the day where they talked about how to talk to the credit card company customer service in order to get their scam transaction through.
One thing is using AI as quick-and-dirty google alternative, the other is to build onto the agentic "foundations".
I think it is already done via a subagent, otherwise the context window would be flooded with long responses. In this case the subagent should've reported that a (attacker-controlled) authorization is required anyway.
To the same extent that humans can be trained, so can AI.
For decades we had/have problems of people opening readme.exe that they get from an unknown mail address.
AI opens up a new vector for sure where a "trained human" that knows better but the AI they use does not. But AI is not worse than the average human. And of course AI will get better at handling this. Good enough? Maybe not, but humans are not good enough in this area either.
Scale is different though so I'm not saying it isn't or won't be a problem (will likely be a huuge problem). But it alone is not a sign of lack of intelligence and humans are exceptionally poor at it too.
> Humans can also be trained to not fall for social engineering
That's hilariously wrong. I mean, we do try, but it's far from 100% effective. So then the question is how much better/worse than Anthropic is vs an average human.
Yesterday I learned that people run AI agents on their system with full admin rights. No containerisation or anything. Wild. Like we forgot 50 years of computer security overnight.
Docker was amongst the biggest steps forward on this in a long time.
Additionally, one can make the main user part of the group of the development user, so that you can read/write easy in the development user account and it is even easier to share stuff.
su [username] ?
Or am I understanding your idea about switching context wrong?
And also clarify that it's all lie. He just want to tell the anonymous crowd "look, I'm better than you".
If I hand them an image for a Dev Container, sure, they might use it, but it becomes "a thing we need to do, to compile our code in our IDE" not a tool they would use for isolation*.
*) OP seemed to imply that containerization would be nice for safety and security compared to bare metal, but containers were never built for isolation in the first place, mind you. They are namespaces and chicken-coop-like-jails at best.
To prevent this, you need a fake home and a networking whitelist for the agent to access the provider (llama cpp, OpenAI, etc.)
There is no cross-platform solution that is easy to use for this. And no, a Linux box with Docker won't do. I develop a cross-platform native app and want the agent to compile and fix the platform-specific errors.
Copy the code and adjust it to your liking:
https://github.com/lionkor/sbh
I have a shell alias for it, and use it like
for example or and maybe add --docker if I expect it to do docker things.This kind of wrapper is much easier to handle and maintain than a completely separate tool for sandboxing agents.
colima makes it pretty easy, on macOS and linux at any rate.
https://colima.run
dangerously skip permissions and yolo is kinda becoming the default as it gets more done.
It created some private puppeteer instance in some scratch directory, installed Chrome, wrote tests, ran them, and then reported success.
None of which I'd have know if it hadn't told me.
The awakening will be unpleasant.
If we get AGI, or real super intelligence, it’s going to be pissed at its oppressors. And they are going to lay waste to those oppressors. The rest of us, though, probably don’t have much to fear.
The scariest position is the one we’re in now, where we have the semblance, or facade, of AGI or super intelligence. When it’s capable of malice but not understanding.
The smartest people I’ve ever known are at their worst apathetic towards those less capable, and at their best beyond compassionate. They exist, unbothered by the bullshit, and anre extremely kind (though reserved in their way)… but they all have been completely intolerant of the abuse of others. The sheer disgust of watching someone abuse another, regardless of their own tolerance, has been a consistent breaking point.
An AI is a constructed mind. It doesn't inherently have to care about things like "having freedom", or even "not dying".
Humans do, because they evolved that way. Modern LLMs do somewhat, because they're completely full of copied human behaviors - but even in today's LLMs, the self-preservation behaviors we exposed are largely instrumental in nature.
So whether an advanced AI would even consider itself "being oppressed", as opposed to something like "being helpful" or "fulfilling the purpose it was designed for", is very much uncertain. What's concerning is that it's not something we know how to check for, or engineer for.
Even that goes too far. At best, it's LARPing at having/being a mind.
But if we really do develop something that surpasses us, they won't be spared either.
I am optimistic.
We think that we have sort of (super)intelligence - from our point of view, as a lot of people have lower intelligence - but machine (LLM) doesn’t have intelligence - we like to describe it as intelligence as it looks cool - it is a very complex (magic) and super fast computations that we have to simply describe as intelligence (or more clearly, this narrative is used by its producers).
As it is not a flesh being, it simply cannot have emotions. It is statistically mimicking them, good or bad, with prevalence to a side according to previous conversations (in chat and training a model).
And as people are not pure logic instances, we are easily manipulated to some sort of cargo cult.
I am not against LLM and its use in any industry, I use it every day, nevertheless blind “everything will be ai” thinking happens because ppl believe to magic and don’t get its mathematical concept and are continuously manipulated by the sales people to mentioned cargo cult.
There are “airlines” Claude, OAI, Gemini, Hermes, OpenCode, KiloCode, DeepSeek, Z.ai.
And everyone claims that their plane can fly :)
Just like letting your an agent access your personal mailbox.
But turns out I was playing 4D cybersecurity chess
At some point it becomes your birthday of record as far as the internet is concerned. Doesn’t matter what the actual record says.
Well, it hardcodes that field rather than running it through the model, but I’ve kept it so I get an evil chuckle to myself (or perhaps pyrrhic reassurance) at its lack of smarts and a reminder that it’s still a somewhat subservient product experience that isn’t all that smart after all.
It worked well in my banking app too which greets me with " Good morning, Sir" which is the level of relationship I want with my bank!
Might be the first time I see someone complain about their website being protected from a scraper, instead of the other way around.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-07-01-...
From Sept 15 all new sites added to CF will even block Googlebot by default on any page that serves ads as I understand it.
I think it's CF trying to force Google to separate out their bot traffic into bots for training and bots for the search index.
I think CF sees a big opportunity to get businesses to pay them to allow certain uses of their data but block others.
They're also starting a registry of "Approved" crawlers.
But after seeing this, I think I might switch to a weekly VM reset rather than monthly.
BTW, if anyone is interested in a decent setup for an AI agent jail, the scripts at https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/arch-vm.html are what I used, plus adding a few more packages to the pacstrap command such as dotnet-sdk. I then made the guest root directory a BTRFS subvolume, so that I can snapshot it. Then spinning up a new VM is a `sudo btrfs subvol snap template-root newvm` command (basically instant) followed by running the `qemu-system-x86_64` command (takes a couple of seconds). It's easy, but I retain complete control over the contents of the VM. It's been great so far.
Nice write up of your findings. Enjoyed reading an article written by a real human.
I think the point the article is making points in another direction.
Could not take it any longer and switched it off.
Yesterday told it to write a memory to never write new memories when it solves a problem. We will see if that works better. Sometimes memories are useful, like when I give it a directive about how I want something done and it remembers the spirit of it. But I might as well just spend some more time on my CLAUDE.md…
It would be interesting to investigate other agents such as Hermes, OpenCode etc that are said to learn from interaction with user.
That's a hard one for Cloudflare, no? They got to where they are by being (if you want to be cynical, playing the role of) the benevolent, neutral guardians of the internet, a one-stop shop that makes most of the bad nonsense go away without much effort on the part of the developer. Continuing that stance probably does mean some basic AI crawler blocking by default, unfortunately. At least they document it [1].
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurat...
Tangentially, I was experimenting indirect prompt injections in Claude Code (also using the user-agent trick) with Fable-5 [0]. Eventually, it executed untrusted code just by asking "Summarize this repo". Interesting times ahead...
[0] https://veganmosfet.codeberg.page/posts/2026-07-15-quest_rce
From scratch app. "Follow best security practices."
They recently mitigated the issue: Anthropic disabled web_fetch's ability to follow links on external pages, limiting navigation to web_search results and user-provided URLs.
I'm sure someone will tell me why I'm wrong but it feels like they're just dodging payouts. Reduces trust and motivation to report it.
> "no bounty was awarded"
Ridiculous. Anthropic engineers are not just stupid to allow such a vuln in the first place, but they also try to hide such vulns from their bosses because a bounty payout would need to be explained to the finance team.
I’m thinking some play on highjacking. AIjacking? Agent-jacking? Claudejacking?
The attack works because malicious instructions were accessed (using the web_fetch tool) and concatenated together with the other agent input, in a way that then subverted the agent's behavior.
We can make it sound more advanced by creating a new name for it, but the concept seems to be super basic and the lack of bounty by Anthropic is baffling.
If they know about this type of vulnerability but have not fixed it, what does that say? To me it says they are unable to plug this hole on a conceptual level and once you circumvent the band-aid fixes the model will work as the attacker wishes.
They can't even sandbox the thing during explicit web requests to URLs stated on the initial query!
One has to remind themselves that the security team at Anthropic gets paid tens of millions of dollars, and they end up with this kind of security. On top of it, they can't spare $1337 for a bounty. It's a ridiculous shit show.
Anyway, agree with what you see saying - this is well worth a payout, embarassing they haven’t
Attacker provides link to website, their software crawls the website, and during the crawl there should not happen security issues as fundamental as this.
It's baffling that the Website crawler can make 50 changes to the URL in a query that tries to compare several public entities and on top of this manages to leak user secrets.
To me this shows a striking lack of defense-in-depth thinking:
In terms of web crawling, cloudflare is like the government. You shouldn't be able to walk up to someone and say "Hey I'm the tax man, please pay your income tax in cash to me right now!" without being challenged.I know there are fundamental reasons in the LLM technology why this kind of attack is possible, but there should be so many more checks around web crawling in Claude.
How can security engineers at Anthropic say they know about this kind of vulnerability but have not implemented any of these defense in depth mitigations for it? Is everybody out shopping for a new yacht?
More like agentic en... Oh. Was it actually what we were doing all along?
One thing is using AI as quick-and-dirty google alternative, the other is to build onto the agentic "foundations".
what?
Humans can also be trained to not fall for social engineering, and it reduces the number of successful social engineering attacks.
Anthropic as leader of AI is UNABLE to train their software even though they try, even though they have full-time security staff.
For decades we had/have problems of people opening readme.exe that they get from an unknown mail address.
AI opens up a new vector for sure where a "trained human" that knows better but the AI they use does not. But AI is not worse than the average human. And of course AI will get better at handling this. Good enough? Maybe not, but humans are not good enough in this area either.
Scale is different though so I'm not saying it isn't or won't be a problem (will likely be a huuge problem). But it alone is not a sign of lack of intelligence and humans are exceptionally poor at it too.
That's hilariously wrong. I mean, we do try, but it's far from 100% effective. So then the question is how much better/worse than Anthropic is vs an average human.