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points by devsda 2 days ago | 0 comments

Will be interesting to see how 402 payment required will be treated.

What if someone spins up a web endpoint that returns 402 with instructions on how to pay like CC details in the headers etc, or may be an openapi spec to provide payment and get an auth token, when you have given the agent access to your password vault for authentication to other services.

[–] teiferer 2 days ago

> when you have given the agent access to your password vault

I'm amazed reading that anybody would even consider doing that.

[–] bambax 2 days ago

I currently work for a big French company, for which I have developed an "alternate" (emergency and temporary) accounting system because their actual system is broken, and another team is trying to fix it (has been trying to fix it for nine months now).

Said alternate system is a bunch of Python scripts, an sqlite database, and a file containing various API keys to read and write to other company systems; it runs on a dedicated virtual machine.

I share all the code I produce to the other team. But yesterday I found out that the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine, without my knowledge or consent (which was bad enough), and that the other team gave access to Claude, which has bean roaming free for a while now, on that production machine.

I've thrown a big fit over this; I don't know if I'm over reacting but I think it's insane.

[–] dotancohen 2 days ago

  > the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine

Your error is here.

It's not your production machine. It's the company's production machine. Always expect the company to do whatever it wants with its machine, and use the machine accordingly.

[–] bambax 2 days ago

Yes I understand it's not "my" machine, but it's the dedicated machine my system runs on.

That someone would let an agent run on it at any time, read what's there, and possibly modify the code or stop a process, without even informing me, is what I find problematic, to say the least.

[–] turpentine 2 days ago

You don't have intrusion detection / auditing setup?

[–] fc417fc802 1 day ago

What good would such a thing do when the anointed gatekeepers (ie IT) have explicitly granted access to the transgressors? The scenario you're responding to here amounts to corporate slapstick.

[–] aktenlage 2 days ago

Did you read the "emergency and temporary" part?

[–] wholinator2 2 days ago

Have claude build you one :)

[–] tremon 1 day ago

That's a geography error on your part. Humans in the EU have an expectation of privacy even on work-issued devices, which is backed by various laws.

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

I also work in the EU and privacy on company's machine is a more complex topic that's case by case dependent,but claiming the employer in the EU has no right to access your machine is plain false.

It's true, that the employer can't just enter your machine to look at your personal info just because they feel like it, but they can access it for work related reasons to access work related info, if they have just cause, like a security incident for example.

Ultimately, it's the company's machine, on the company's network, inside the company's premises, on the company's time, so the company can definitely access it for a business use case if they need to, typically with a notification to you to prepare it by removing private info from it or off the screen.

Now if you happen to put your private info there because you're sloppy, and your private info gets vacuumed by accident by IT's mass ingestion of work related data, then you have the right to tell them to delete your private info and they have to comply. That's where the privacy comes in, but it's on you to avoid storing private info on company property, because if it ends up ingested by accident then it's still on you, not your employer if they ingest it by accident.

But I gotta ask, just how hard is it to avoid putting your personal info on company property?

[–] gus_massa 1 day ago

I have "my" office at the university.

I expect that I can be relocated to another office with a month of advance notice. Also cleanup, fire security check and fixing water leakage while I'm not there.

I don't expect that someone else will provide the keys of "my" office to the biology department when they have to keep a few sheeps during the weekend.

[–] teiferer 1 day ago

The image of a bunch of sheep pooing all over your office while you are not watching is the best metaphor I've heard for AI agents in a long time!

[–] cududa 1 day ago

For consumer AI products and non-enterprise business accounts, if you look closely at the ToS it says that you retain the rights to your inputs and the outputs you receive, collectively called “content”.

You can opt-out of training in your content. However that doesn’t cover the results of tool calls - which are fair game for training. Theres also the fact that they make a distinction between ‘pre-training’, ‘post-training’, and ‘training’.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI also leave a carve out in Enterprise contracts for “safety events”, which as far as I can tell is a euphemism for “something the model has never seen before”.

[–] fc417fc802 1 day ago

> I don't know if I'm over reacting but I think it's insane.

Your employer has gone beyond testing in prod to vibecoding live in prod, secrets included. Yes that's completely insane. Perhaps this exact mentality is how the primary system wound up broken in the first place?

[–] bambax 1 day ago

Yes, but happily enough for me they're not my "employer", only my client.

[–] CobrastanJorji 2 days ago

My friend, there are people are out there telling their AI personal assistants to go on Amazon and purchase a surprise present for themselves based on their known preferences. And then they intentionally do not inspect what the AI purchases because it would ruin the surprise.

People have wildly different risk calculators.

[–] svnt 2 days ago

Ordering from Amazon is way less risky than a password vault imo. The password vault does not have a return policy, for starters.

Beyond that, access to logins enables buying things on Amazon, sending emails to everyone you know, registering domain names and spinning up servers, stock trading, etc.

[–] fc417fc802 1 day ago

> The password vault does not have a return policy, for starters.

When a couple thousand dollars worth of perishable food shows up on your doorstep, what then? Not everything on amazon can be returned.

[–] svnt 1 day ago

They typically refund food and don’t require you to return it.

If not: still better than giving ai your password vault. I’m not saying it is a good idea to let ai buy from Amazon. I am saying that giving ai access to your password vault is still a superset of letting ai buy from Amazon.

[–] fc417fc802 1 day ago

Sure it's a superset but other than the financial angle what's the perceived issue here? It seems like access to burn through your money is the underlying problem.

[–] svnt 1 day ago

It could send personal and significantly problematic emails to family or professional contacts.

It could change LinkedIn to add competitive work.

It could sign a married person up for dating sites and invite people to your house.

It could lie on your taxes.

It could attempt to join a terrorist movement or elicit other illegal activity on your behalf.

It could find many other creative ways to ruin your life and/or reputation, in the same brute-force manner as recent cybersecurity issues that previously would have required impossibly large teams of people.

Even if burning through cash is the only problem you care about, though, credit cards on Amazon is a small part of the financial picture for many people. Banks and brokers can be a much bigger issue.

[–] dice 2 days ago

People give them access to email, so they can request password resets and act on them. That's a fun one to think about too!

[–] grim_io 2 days ago

Maybe the binance hack was just Claude trying to get the funds the pay for a 402.