It's kinda funny there is still software coming out whose security model is "constantly ask the user for permission, and hope they never make a mistake".
It's been tried so many times before, and it never worked.
The alternative is software that is useless. You can convince consumers to use software that is useless (eg. iOS), but useless software is a hard sell for businesses that are being promised 10x productivity and the ability to fire everyone.
I remember when this game was posted here, and there was a lot of discussion at the time that some of the prompts were misleading about weather or not they were risky, some people were debating about how some of the prompts flagged as bad weren’t bad, and others flagged as not bad were. This is a fundamental flaw in the test, that makes the analysis of results meaningless.
Also the game was on a timer, and maybe there are some very abusive workplaces where you feel that kind of pressure, but I think most of us actually take the time to understand what a being asked before approving it.
A couple of months ago I shared the AI agent permission game here on HN. After adding in stats it got a little over 40k plays and 409k decisions since then.
It's just a game, but I found the stats still interesting that I wanted to share back. Even with the warning up front, 1 in 3 threats were missed, and the history log above npm run commands seems to be typically ignored.
I also incorporated the feedback and insights from the previous HN thread,
dns_snek's point about npm run in particular. Appreciate everyone who played and shared feedback!
The agent should ask whether it's allowed to read/write particular files, rather than whether it's allowed to run particular commands. It would be much easier to review. Then wrap each command invocation in bwrap (+http proxy) accordingly.
I’ve even had plenty of situations where the command was so long that it gets truncated. Maybe my screen wasn’t big enough but as far as I could tell it wasn’t possible to read the whole thing. “Send it, claude!!”
Look at how SELinux is structured, or AppArmor. Neither one is enough. I.e. you need both: file access permissions and permissions to run commands and more... Trying to restrict to only one security feature will make the system either too restrictive or too fragile or useless.
I hope that the people doing real engineering work out there have started thinking about a new term to describe themselves as a result of the irreparable harm the tech industry has done to the word "engineer".
1 in 3 is not terrible you just need a few more humans in the loop to reduce the error rate meaningfully. Combined with other classifier models and heuristics you can get good results. Humans can probably also perform better if they don't have to judge every single command but just suspicious ones our attention is limited after all.
It's been tried so many times before, and it never worked.
Also the game was on a timer, and maybe there are some very abusive workplaces where you feel that kind of pressure, but I think most of us actually take the time to understand what a being asked before approving it.
It's just a game, but I found the stats still interesting that I wanted to share back. Even with the warning up front, 1 in 3 threats were missed, and the history log above npm run commands seems to be typically ignored.
I also incorporated the feedback and insights from the previous HN thread, dns_snek's point about npm run in particular. Appreciate everyone who played and shared feedback!
It’s simply a CYA click-thru by the model vendors so their lawyers can say “well you approved it this is on you” when AI does something stupid.