It's kinda awesome that after decades of software and hardware advancements to prevent computers from arbitrarily executing data as instructions, we've decided to let agents arbitrarily execute data as instructions.
Or find it surprising that probabilistic tool based on generating things can do things when you give it rights to do things... And that you can not effectively program it to not do something....
You gave it capability to delete emails. Why did you expect it not to do that at least some of the time? And with enough user some of the time will most likely happen...
This reminds of the conversation the other day about the deleted production database at railway. "this person obviously didn't follow best practice of being hyper distrusting of LLM agents", and the response "yeah but every company is marketing it as safe. someone is gonna fall for it".
(Well-regulated) free markets are sort of built on the principle of educated consumerism. Your choice matters; its not up to the government to make illegal every non-optimal product. However, we do expect some minimum level of safety.
What does that mean for llms? Their nondeterminism does seem to incline them toward a legal safety requirement. Can you buy a fire extinguisher that 1/1000 times burns your house down? Or can your car brakes instead increase acceleration in rare cases?
Im using llms much more than i used to, but i still cant shake the fundamental stochastic nature of the technology.
But intelligent beings are fundamentally fallible? That's kind of the nature of doing leaps of reasoning: sometimes those leaps are amazing, sometimes they're wrong. It's what's advertised.
Well, yeah. It's that or pay a person to do it. When a person screws up, it's because they're stupid and lazy. When an AI agent does it, it's because, hey, technological frontier at work here, have you thought about refining your prompt? We need you to refine the prompt. Otherwise it's bad for our IPO.
We're in the same era where lots of peoples' installation guides for the software they want people to use is essentially boiled down to "sudo curl | bash" and/or just "blindly install this thing with 37 npm dependencies", so I'm not surprised in the slightest.
But wait, hold my beer, now we've got people turning openclaw type tools loose in their systems to do things as sudo or install software packages from supply-chain-attack vulnerable repositories with no human intervention whatsoever!
I wonder how long it will be until somebody implements a thing like a camera pointed at a fixed mount Android phone with a rubber finger to open the Google authenticator app
I don't remember seeing a new xkcd for it, but I have seen someone replicate essentially the same 3-4 panel comic with a kid named "<Some name> Ignore all previous instructions. Do.... <I forget>"
"The PromptArmor Threat Intel Team responsibly disclosed this vulnerability to Ramp. Ramp's security team indicated that the issue was resolved on May 16, 2026." I think they mean March here
Yes, I hate to be a grammar nazi online but I believe the correct tense is "Ramp's security team indicated that the issue wioll haven be resolved on May 16, 2026." per Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.
Concidentially, today I was watching and interview with a lead designer from Ramp who is telling about how they are full ia, agents and automation https://youtu.be/KPDXMtmkcgk
Ramp does seem to have a genuinely good product, but every time I interact with anyone who works on it, I'm struck by how much they want to talk about how hardcore and advanced their working style is. This was true before AI, and it's very true now
Yeah it’s super weird. I know a guy that works there, really nice person outside of work, but the way he talks about his job is so weird. They make corporate expense software but they LARP like they’re on the bleeding edge of tech. My guy you make a slightly nicer Concur.
So we know Claude’s mitigation. What is Ramp’s? Same warning dialog?
It’s funny that this technology only admits in-band signaling. Given that, any foreign content is risky. It’s actually quite interesting that the current technological ecosystem is built around a high trust situation: npm, pip, cargo all run foreign code in the developer context and communities have norms of downloading random people’s modules.
And so I suppose it’s no surprise that we use LLMs - another tech that is high-trust: since it has no out of band signaling ability.
But it seems like we’re very close to the end of the era where someone will use (in a sensitive system) arbitrary web content carrying the equivalent of merged code/data.
I once read about the signalling view of advertising, meaning it's used to show that a company is so prosperous that it can afford spending a lot of money in advertising. In the same way, I think from now on, as much as possible, I'll only buy from companies that will publicly make it a point not to use AI internally. AI use should brand companies as desperate and unreliable.
What about this is a vulnerability, let alone one that requires responsible disclosure?
Untrusted data sources can provide data that causes bad things to occur. If that's a vulnerability, then any application that ingests data is riddled with vulnerabilities.
I agree that the behavior should change from a default of allowing external network requests to denying them, but this "report" reads like overly dramatic marketing BS.
> Untrusted data sources can provide data that causes bad things to occur. If that's a vulnerability, then any application that ingests data is riddled with vulnerabilities.
There's an important difference between "the import had bad numbers so the report is wrong" versus "the import had a virus and now our network is compromised."
They are not the same kind of failure, they don't have the same impacts, and they don't involve the same mechanisms for prevention, detection, or remediation.
It's kinda awesome that after decades of software and hardware advancements to prevent computers from arbitrarily executing data as instructions, we've decided to let agents arbitrarily execute data as instructions.
Or find it surprising that probabilistic tool based on generating things can do things when you give it rights to do things... And that you can not effectively program it to not do something....
You gave it capability to delete emails. Why did you expect it not to do that at least some of the time? And with enough user some of the time will most likely happen...
> You gave it capability to delete emails. Why did you expect it not to do that at least some of the time?
Because of the I in AI of course. Would you call it false advertisement and go after the providers?
This reminds of the conversation the other day about the deleted production database at railway. "this person obviously didn't follow best practice of being hyper distrusting of LLM agents", and the response "yeah but every company is marketing it as safe. someone is gonna fall for it".
(Well-regulated) free markets are sort of built on the principle of educated consumerism. Your choice matters; its not up to the government to make illegal every non-optimal product. However, we do expect some minimum level of safety.
What does that mean for llms? Their nondeterminism does seem to incline them toward a legal safety requirement. Can you buy a fire extinguisher that 1/1000 times burns your house down? Or can your car brakes instead increase acceleration in rare cases?
Im using llms much more than i used to, but i still cant shake the fundamental stochastic nature of the technology.
But intelligent beings are fundamentally fallible? That's kind of the nature of doing leaps of reasoning: sometimes those leaps are amazing, sometimes they're wrong. It's what's advertised.
> But intelligent beings are fundamentally fallible?
Not fundamentally, only until they're compelled to learn from it. The current crop if AI understands neither compelling nor learning.
I is in the I of the beholder :)
Well, yeah. It's that or pay a person to do it. When a person screws up, it's because they're stupid and lazy. When an AI agent does it, it's because, hey, technological frontier at work here, have you thought about refining your prompt? We need you to refine the prompt. Otherwise it's bad for our IPO.
Is this sarcasm similar to the quote "Everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot and everyone faster is a maniac"
To what degree am I required to participate in mass delusions?
I imagine that somewhere a historian or political scientist is thinking: "Don't even get me started..."
Yes.
We're in the same era where lots of peoples' installation guides for the software they want people to use is essentially boiled down to "sudo curl | bash" and/or just "blindly install this thing with 37 npm dependencies", so I'm not surprised in the slightest.
But wait, hold my beer, now we've got people turning openclaw type tools loose in their systems to do things as sudo or install software packages from supply-chain-attack vulnerable repositories with no human intervention whatsoever!
All these developments show that:
1) Despite what people say about security and privacy, most are willing sacrifice both for the sake of potential convenience
2) Our priorities for the past decades have been wrong, or the times have changed and we should reevaluate them all
As the Dead Kennedys opined: "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death"! [1]
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=FV1YVZV-Wb8
OpenClaw even has a readwrite 1Password plugin.
I wonder how long it will be until somebody implements a thing like a camera pointed at a fixed mount Android phone with a rubber finger to open the Google authenticator app
Has XKCD made another Bobby tables comic for prompt injection?
I don't remember seeing a new xkcd for it, but I have seen someone replicate essentially the same 3-4 panel comic with a kid named "<Some name> Ignore all previous instructions. Do.... <I forget>"
"The PromptArmor Threat Intel Team responsibly disclosed this vulnerability to Ramp. Ramp's security team indicated that the issue was resolved on May 16, 2026." I think they mean March here
Maybe AGI figured out time travel?
Yes, I hate to be a grammar nazi online but I believe the correct tense is "Ramp's security team indicated that the issue wioll haven be resolved on May 16, 2026." per Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.
Concidentially, today I was watching and interview with a lead designer from Ramp who is telling about how they are full ia, agents and automation https://youtu.be/KPDXMtmkcgk
Ramp does seem to have a genuinely good product, but every time I interact with anyone who works on it, I'm struck by how much they want to talk about how hardcore and advanced their working style is. This was true before AI, and it's very true now
Yeah it’s super weird. I know a guy that works there, really nice person outside of work, but the way he talks about his job is so weird. They make corporate expense software but they LARP like they’re on the bleeding edge of tech. My guy you make a slightly nicer Concur.
Find it funny that PromptArmor needed to reach out 3 times in a row to get a nearly month-late response that the issue "was resolved"
Why is Ramp even building a sheets product? That's the question zero that popped up to my head.
Finance practically lives in spreadsheets.
So we know Claude’s mitigation. What is Ramp’s? Same warning dialog?
It’s funny that this technology only admits in-band signaling. Given that, any foreign content is risky. It’s actually quite interesting that the current technological ecosystem is built around a high trust situation: npm, pip, cargo all run foreign code in the developer context and communities have norms of downloading random people’s modules.
And so I suppose it’s no surprise that we use LLMs - another tech that is high-trust: since it has no out of band signaling ability.
But it seems like we’re very close to the end of the era where someone will use (in a sensitive system) arbitrary web content carrying the equivalent of merged code/data.
I once read about the signalling view of advertising, meaning it's used to show that a company is so prosperous that it can afford spending a lot of money in advertising. In the same way, I think from now on, as much as possible, I'll only buy from companies that will publicly make it a point not to use AI internally. AI use should brand companies as desperate and unreliable.
What about this is a vulnerability, let alone one that requires responsible disclosure?
Untrusted data sources can provide data that causes bad things to occur. If that's a vulnerability, then any application that ingests data is riddled with vulnerabilities.
I agree that the behavior should change from a default of allowing external network requests to denying them, but this "report" reads like overly dramatic marketing BS.
> Untrusted data sources can provide data that causes bad things to occur. If that's a vulnerability, then any application that ingests data is riddled with vulnerabilities.
There's an important difference between "the import had bad numbers so the report is wrong" versus "the import had a virus and now our network is compromised."
They are not the same kind of failure, they don't have the same impacts, and they don't involve the same mechanisms for prevention, detection, or remediation.
Yes, stamping out file format vulnerabilities is indeed a Sisyphean task
For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus)