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Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

github.com

21–30 of 272 posts

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#21

I wonder if they are gonna stop us from using gpt subscriptions in alternative harnesses. If not - that doesn't matter much, codex cli is a remarkably unremarkable harness.

"remarkably unremarkable harness" is why I like it so much.

I don't, feel better with Pi with a custom set of extensions.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#22

I wonder if they are gonna stop us from using gpt subscriptions in alternative harnesses. If not - that doesn't matter much, codex cli is a remarkably unremarkable harness.

Anthropic and Google already charge extra to use your own harness. That's 100% of the reason I'm using OpenAI. If they go down that path I'll just go back to my old buddy Claude, or maybe buy a second Spark and keep it local.

Well, my backup plan is GLM. Cheap and not that bad really.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

I assume OP interpreted it as encryption that hides the prompts from OpenAI rather than OpenAI hiding information from users.

I'd be all for homomorphic encryption on inference, but as you say, this is probably mostly to prevent end users from observing intermediate results.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#26
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume OP interpreted it as encryption that hides the prompts from OpenAI rather than OpenAI hiding information from users.

ooooooof yeah totally misinterpreted it lmao

Apple's Private Cloud Compute is E2EE between the client and the attested node. Not sure if anyone else is legitimately doing that -- Apple has definitely gone the furthest in terms of verifiably ensuring that requests and responses are not misusable by Apple.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is really not distinguishing itself. Even the hosted inference sucks.

At least the local models they put out are pretty good for their weight class. Could be worse, could be releasing the same amount of local models as Anthropic.

Google has the benefit of billions of devices in the wild that they control. Anthropic really doesn’t have distribution for local models, makes sense they’re not playing in that space.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#30

Could someone explain to me where exactly the encryption is happening? I assumed that the main agent makes calls to sub-agents locally. Does Codex work in such a way where the main agent makes calls to sub-agents in the backend (openai server) before reaching local?

Sure. "Traditionally", your agent would send a text prompt to the sub-agent, then it goes off doing it's work. In the logs/session data, the clear-text prompt would be there, so if I want to see what's happening, I just browse the data. It's all just clear-text prompts being sent everywhere, even when you were using the experimental "sub-agents" stuff in Codex, before Sol et al was available.

Now, when using Sol or Terra (Luna seems unaffected), instead of the agent sending clear-text prompt to the sub-agent, it sends a ciphertext generated on OpenAIs backend, which ends up being the prompt, then agent sends this ciphertext to the sub-agent, which then continues to use that for further inference to OpenAIs backend. Only delegated inter-agent messages are encrypted, not all session data. Now if you browse the data, it's all encrypted content, that can only be decrypted by OpenAI and their backend.

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