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Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

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Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#52

So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.

You are correct.

You can't trust the agent, let alone its harness, to oberve any particular directive you give it, so "md files" provide no meaningful protection for anything important.

But users are broadly reckless and naive and commercial vendors are exploitative and irresponsonsible, so the vendors take advantage of what they can get away with for as long as they can get away with it.

Use a tight sandbox, and join the chorus loudly when others press on vendors to be make user safety an earnest and hard-to-abandon priority.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#54
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is more that you should not blame the user (why didn't you set up sandbox instead of directly using the tool of big corp) if a tool does something unexpected. If your Dropbox client would suddenly just upload your home directory instead of it's folder you configured you'd also not blame the user that they use Dropbox, you'd blame Dropbox for not doing their job correctly or being user hostile.

Is it 'unexpected' when we've been hearing stories like this every week for 2 years now?

Not every Anthropic user follows HN or random X posts about these issues.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#55

Honestly what else would you expect an AI agent to do when using remote inference? Isn't giving full context into your code base the whole point?

I'd expect it to be smart about what it actually needs to put in its context. I doubt it needs .env files, for example.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#57

So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.

I don't understand these people. Agent instructions in markdown is barely a suggestion. I have one which says "All code in this repository is executed in docker containers, run the services with `docker compose run --rm php-cli "$@"`. Gemini and Claude more often than not refuse to abide and will try to execute the environment using /opt/homebrew/bin/php on my host…

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#58

The real solution to these kind of problems is sandboxing. I use podman through a bash script to launch a container whenever I want an agent to work on one of my repos. When done I just generate git patches and port back everything generated. In this way I'm not afraid of letting the agents totally lose on my computer.

Are you doing something more advanced with Podman than just mounting the files? How is the access for relevant files given? How is the authentication shared across multiple uses? Just curious to streamline the process.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#59
post #17

why do people give these LLMs full access to everything and then complain when it does somethign stupid? that is what sandboxes are for.

When I give my text editor or file browser access to everything I wouldn't expect it to exfiltrate data without asking.

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Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#60

So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.

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