[ExI] Is it possible to have secure AI agents? (Not yet)

[Keith Henson]

Security with AI is certainly a major problem.

I get around the problem by working entirely in the open.  I would
like someone to steal the work I have done on storing renewable energy
by vaporizing the carbon out of municipal waste into storable syngas.

But alas, there is little or no appreciation of this variation on
1860s gas-making technology.

It will not solve the CO2 and energy problems, but it is a good start
and could lead to a solution to these problems at scale.

Keith

On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 7:05 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 8:58 AM BillK via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> Is a secure AI assistant possible?
>> Experts have made progress in LLM security. But some doubt AI
>> assistants are ready for prime time.
>> By Grace Huckins   February 11, 2026
>>
>> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/11/1132768/is-a-secure-ai-assistant-possible/>
>> Quote:
>> But all that power has consequences. If you want your AI personal
>> assistant to manage your inbox, then you need to give it access to
>> your email—and all the sensitive information contained there. If you
>> want it to make purchases on your behalf, you need to give it your
>> credit card info. And if you want it to do tasks on your computer,
>> such as writing code, it needs some access to your local files.
>>
>> There are a few ways this can go wrong.
>> -----------------------
>>
>> Indeed!   BillK  :)
>
>
>
> As a security researcher, the weak link has always been the human element. Leave free thumb drives scattered in a parking lot, and people plug them in at work and unknowingly install malware to their machines. People fall victim to social engineering, scams, divulge secrets in apparently innocent conversations, etc.
>
> Inserting AI agents into any system or process is like inserting humans into what otherwise may be a secure arrangement. The range of possible behaviors, edge cases, failure modes, range of inputs and outputs, is too vast to test, too hard to predict, and there will almost always remain ways an outsider can trigger an unintended consequence that leads to trouble.
>
> Perhaps the problem can be mitigated by having to convince a quorum of security conscious paranoid AI personalities that there is little room for harm in a particular action. But even this won't be full proof, and perhaps it never can be given the general inability to know what pieces of code may eventually do.
>
>
> Jason
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