back to article Hobble your AI agents to prevent them from hurting you too badly

Michael Bargury, CTO of AI security company Zenity, welcomed attendees to the company's AI Agent Security Summit on Wednesday with an unexpected admission. "This is a new space and we – frankly – don't really know what we're doing," he said at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. "But we're trying ... We need to face things as …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    Nah, don't hobble them

    Let them run wild and discover which wonderful lands you can discover.

    After all, it's AI, ain't it ? How can you know what you will discover if you don't let it loose ?

    Don't pay attention to your stock price, this is more important.

    Right ?

    RIGHT ?

  2. Rich 11

    "Hulk mash!"

    Zenity's marketing graphic for its AI Agent Security Summit inadvertently made that point by mixing Marvel and DC Comics motifs.

    Sounds like their marketing department has been replaced by AI.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sick of that tech-bro manchild superhero schtick...

      Is it just me, or is this sort of appropriation of superhero comic/film culture- something long seen as a harmless obsession of tech nerds- now starting to stink distastefully of its association with self-aggrandising techbro-ism, and the sort of man children who never grew into socially-responsible adults because they never had to?

      Elon Musk in particular is a far-right enabling, white-supremacist-sympathiser who was supposedly massively influenced by the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... which was written by Douglas Adams on a typewriter with an "End Apartheid" sticker on the side.

      One wonders what Adams would have made of Musk. Though I suspect Musk himself doesn't, and for all his worship of HHGG never understood that much of it was satire.

      Musk has frequently shown publicly that he has no self-awareness and imagines himself as the hero of the sci-fi works and games he follows, when he's the real-life analogue of the big, evil bad guy.

      One thing Musk and his ilk have done is to prove that many of the scifi-obsessed nerds and geeks, those who supposedly dreamed of a better- or different- world and liked to think they were the idealistic heroes in a world of cynical, self-serving mundane types were nothing of the sort when push came to shove.

      Musk urged humanity to sacrifice social spending in favour of space exploration, supposedly to save the human race. But it's easy to say that when you've been born into wealth, likely to die obscenely wealthy and you're never going to be one of the vast bulk of humanity that has to suffer to fund your elitist dream.

      Because that elitist heroism masquerading as hollow concern about the human race- but not human beings- is Musk and his fellow ultra-wealthy tech chums all over.

      1. HuBo Silver badge
        Pirate

        Re: Sick of that tech-bro manchild superhero schtick...

        Eat the rich! (but NOT the OP, Rich 11!)

  3. cookiecutter Silver badge

    bloody agents

    everywhere i go it's all i hear. agents agents. generative ai does not exist. Agents at best are 50% accurate at a single step task. yet added to this, companies suddenly want "low code, no code" applications all over the place with non human identities that no one will know the ownership of, that data "engineers" will want some sort of admin access for & will ultimately have access to massive ampunts of a companys data.

    it's already hard enough to keep up with that ONE spreadsheet that "dave from accounts " created 20 years ago, that the entire form relies on & no one knows how it works. now multiply that out by the 1000s of expected NHIs that are expected to be popping up in every organisation, that no one will know who created or what they have access to or what they even do.

    chain that together with agent after agent, then fire the staff and offshore it so definitely no one knows what's happening & act surprised when your entire set of data across all your cloud accounts suddenly appears online.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hobble?

    Erm, if your "agents" are hurting you, however badly, wouldn't you just turn them off altogether?

    Oh sorry; profits, big data, cost cutting, ai, blah blah blah. Right.

    Maybe leaving them on will allow the agents to get quite good at hurting you, eh?

    1. hx

      Re: Hobble?

      Marketing commands it. They will solve personlized mattress sales forever with the data they collect. We don't know why they are so obsessed with mattresses, especially since we don't even sell furniture, but they say it's the future and that we're guaranteed to have 750% year-over-year returns on personalized mattress sales with the data they collect, and that's a lot of perecents.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Hobble?

        Surely you mean dog kennels?

  5. dmesg Bronze badge

    Oh noes!! Things are goings wrong! But we were told we could fire all that pesky staff if we just ran

    chown -R AI:AI /

    Whatever can we possibly do??

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      rmuser -y -v AI

      userdel --force --remove AI

      Take your pick.

      1. Radgie Gadgie

        yeah, neither will work after the AI has been let loose.

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