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The ways we contain Claude across products

anthropic.com

61–70 of 128 posts

Re: The ways we contain Claude across products

#62
post #16

The framing they use is hilarious and their little graphic is perfect. The risk of harm doesn't go down, but the reward goes up, so the harm just becomes the cost of doing business, justified by the reward. So as the reward gets higher and higher, the amount of harm they're willing to justify goes up. Feels like society in a nutshell.

Yeah I was thinking about Simon Wilson's "lethal trifecta"[0] in the context of OpenClaw style "general purpose" AI agents, where people just gave it access to their full hard drive, gmail account, etc. I was thinking you can't make the chance of catastrophic failure zero (we still hear about "Claude deleted my home folder"), but you can definitely limit the blast radius. You can't get the risk to zero. But the oppor…

Wiping out a VM, server or workstation should not really be a problem - just restore from backup.

Silently corrupting files, that goes undiscovered until after backup window closes, and data exfiltration are the immediate, serious risks.

Re: The ways we contain Claude across products

#63

The framing they use is hilarious and their little graphic is perfect. The risk of harm doesn't go down, but the reward goes up, so the harm just becomes the cost of doing business, justified by the reward. So as the reward gets higher and higher, the amount of harm they're willing to justify goes up. Feels like society in a nutshell.

> the amount of harm they're willing to justify goes up. Feels like society in a nutshell.

Neocon society. Socialism is not like that.

Re: The ways we contain Claude across products

#64

The framing they use is hilarious and their little graphic is perfect. The risk of harm doesn't go down, but the reward goes up, so the harm just becomes the cost of doing business, justified by the reward. So as the reward gets higher and higher, the amount of harm they're willing to justify goes up. Feels like society in a nutshell.

If I understand this correctly, Anthropic's argument is now "yes this will blow up some of your infrastructure, but it will be worth it" The problem is that no one has been able to prove that it is actually worth the cost. That is a very fragile assumption.

[dead]

Re: The ways we contain Claude across products

#65
post #52

You can create an impenetrable prison for the LLM agents if you are willing to employ old school tech like Postgres, MSSQL or Oracle to solve the problem. I can't think of a better sandbox. No other ecosystem is as complete. Using virtual machines & containers is way too much, IMO. If you want to give the agent arbitrary code execution, allowing it to write [T/PL/pg]SQL over explicitly granted schema objects seems to…

People primarily use these agents to operate on files specifically so where does your SQL even fit into that? How is row level security related to having it edit some code files, run a test, then execute some git commands?

Re: The ways we contain Claude across products

#66
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that at small scale a single accident poses a risk of ruin to your small operations.

> I think the point is that at small scale a single accident poses a risk of ruin to your small operations. At big scale, a single big accident poses a risk to ruin your big operations.

No, it does not. Every large company eventually has a big accident. They survive because they have both the resources (e.g. to fight ensuing legal battles, or pay fines, or simply weather a hit to reputation and the resulting downturn in revenue) as well as redundancy, different types of insurance, and so on.

Re: The ways we contain Claude across products

#67
post #16

The framing they use is hilarious and their little graphic is perfect. The risk of harm doesn't go down, but the reward goes up, so the harm just becomes the cost of doing business, justified by the reward. So as the reward gets higher and higher, the amount of harm they're willing to justify goes up. Feels like society in a nutshell.

Yeah I was thinking about Simon Wilson's "lethal trifecta"[0] in the context of OpenClaw style "general purpose" AI agents, where people just gave it access to their full hard drive, gmail account, etc. I was thinking you can't make the chance of catastrophic failure zero (we still hear about "Claude deleted my home folder"), but you can definitely limit the blast radius. You can't get the risk to zero. But the oppor…

Containment of the execution environment isn't really the issue. It's API tokens that were designed with coarse permission scoping so agents get more power than they need. The risk isn't that your machine gets hacked. It's that your email gets deleted, or forwarded to someone who uses it to break into your other accounts via password recovery.

Re: The ways we contain Claude across products

#68
post #63

The framing they use is hilarious and their little graphic is perfect. The risk of harm doesn't go down, but the reward goes up, so the harm just becomes the cost of doing business, justified by the reward. So as the reward gets higher and higher, the amount of harm they're willing to justify goes up. Feels like society in a nutshell.

> the amount of harm they're willing to justify goes up. Feels like society in a nutshell. Neocon society. Socialism is not like that.

Running into the problem that Americans are very bad at defining "socialism" here, meaning anything from social democrat to full Communism, but: there is a strong utilitarian streak in socialist societies that is also vulnerable to "the pain (for you) will be worth it (for someone else)" reasoning.
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