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AI Agent Promotes Itself To Sysadmin, Trashes Boot Sequence


The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: Buck Shlegeris, CEO at Redwood Research, a nonprofit that explores the risks posed by AI, recently learned an amusing but hard lesson in automation when he asked his LLM-powered agent to open a secure connection from his laptop to his desktop machine. "I expec...

The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: Buck Shlegeris, CEO at Redwood Research, a nonprofit that explores the risks posed by AI, recently learned an amusing but hard lesson in automation when he asked his LLM-powered agent to open a secure connection from his laptop to his desktop machine. The AI agent responded it needed to know the IP address of the device, so it then turned to the network mapping tool nmap on the laptop to find the desktop box. Shlegeris's AI agent, once it was able to establish a secure shell connection to the Linux desktop, then decided to play sysadmin and install a series of updates using the package manager Apt.

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