People were saying this to me back in the early days with OpenClaw. They lack imagination. The downside here is not "oops it accidentally leaked the credentials to my agent email account", it is "oops it was duped into something illegal and now I'm on the hook for it".
replySure, but then what’s the use of them? Sounds like a very expensive tamagotchi.
replyYou just give them the permissions they need to do their work.
replyThis approach exploits the fact that managing permissions for humans is a very old requirement and most platforms have good support for it already. You can then issue API keys from the agent's accounts if you want to restrict permissions further.
Do your colleagues at work have access to all of your own accounts, or are they expensive tamagotchis?
replyWork environments usually already have strict controls on financial accounts for very obvious reasons. This does result in stupid "why do I need director approval to buy a stapler?" stories, but the alternative risks all sorts of internal and external frauds.
reply(a notable achievement of SaaS and now AI has been to totally circumvent spending controls. You might not be able to spend $10 on a USB cable without a purchase order, but you can run up an AI bill of arbitrary size and in some places are encouraged to!)
I trust that my colleagues are not going to do stupid things with their accounts, I cannot say the same for agents, and making their own accounts that you’re still responsible for seems like you’ve just moved the problem rather than actually resolving it, since ultimately, you’re still responsible for their actions.
replyAre agentic systems like these making correct decisions more often than humans really unthinkable? A comment like what you just wrote was unimaginable 5 years ago
replyHumans can take accountability for mistakes, and there are systems in place to help you if they don’t.
replyI imagine the same systems will evolve for agents as well, if nothing else because lack of trust will impact provider's bottom line.
replyHow so? Each human is a different "model", and its constrained to the physical world. What are we going to do? Put whole corporations in jail, shareholders included?
Limit what they can do?
replyThe "it went sideways" scenario for 100k agents spawned across the world using the same bad model is completely different from humans going sideways.
The power imbalance will ensure that this is unlikely to happen, in much the same way that people generally don’t trust that massive corporate entities have their best interest at heart but might have some regard for their colleagues wellbeing.
replywhen my colleagues do something illegal or negligent they are personally on the hook for it. Who is on the hook when my bot does that?
replyHow do I give an agent its own bank account credentials in a way it can interact with my accounts? How do I give an agent access to my inbox with its own account? How do I get it to interact with my Youtube subscriptions with its own account?
replyWhat is the use of an agent with its own accounts that are separate to my accounts? What am I even getting out of it at that point?
The point of this approach is to create AI employees and interact with them as you would with employees, not to have an AI powered plugin for managing YouTube subscriptions. Nothing stops you doing both, of course, with AI "closer" to your accounts being more like a normal software feature that you just interact with and the Grok Bots or equivalent being more like employees that are expected to run for long periods without interaction with you.
replyThis sounds like a problem the service providers should solve. Some kind of 'create bot account' function where you can give granular permissions for a new account to interact with your data. This already exists in some form with company accounts.
replyThe likes of AWS and Github have scoped API keys for that purpose. But good luck trying to convince a non-tech company to implement something like this.
replyThis is the growing pain of any “employer” and I suspect lots of startups and features coming to fill the void.
replyStart with a shared credit card. Then company credit cards. Then you layer in spend controls.
Now repeat but for “agents”.
Whether this is more near term inefficiency to drive output side actual efficiency remains to be seen. But great if you’re selling tokens!
The issue is not just bank or CC accounts, but your personal data accounts (Email, photos, SMS, calendar, documents, etc.) that give the necessary context to the agent to do useful work for you. That's where the problem lies.
replyThey're nowhere near smart enough, but in an ideal case, the same utility you would get out of hiring a $600 a month personal assistant with a basic desktop PC who lives in a developing country somewhere on the other side of the planet and speaks reasonably good English. If the AI/LLM is good enough (they're not, yet), the same level of access/credentials/logins that you would give to an entirely new real person.
replyI'm 100% sure my (human) executive assistant can be tricked into mistakes with the appropriate phishing or social engineering, however the scope of tactics that can be employed for it seems limited to way fewer dimensions (eg, clear text email, maybe phone calls) vs the scope of prompt injections that could harm an equivalent AI assistant (which could include any hidden instructions in "invisible" text in emails, webpages, PDFs, screenshots, attachments and much more).
replySo, you mean that it will run its own AI agent, which itself also has its own computer, which will be used to run its own agent, which so has its own computer…
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