I observe this type of thing all the time. I ask the agent a question about the repo we are in and it starts trying to use sudo to look at files and scripts outside the repo to find things that might provide useful context but are not what I asked for. Then I put a directive in never to look at neighbouring repos and told it that it can’t sudo and it stopped doing it, and explicitly says “I could look here but my guidelines say not to”.

Mind you I’m talking about deepseek where I can actually read the thinking traces but even based on tool calls I can see that just telling the agents not to sudo works for OpenAI models too, very rarely do they try to use sudo calls.