alt Hacker NewsOpen claw: aka. open door to a remote privilege escalation potentially granting root access to your computer (and if you're using it "as intended" possibly all of your email/internet logins/accounts, your credit card, etc.) to any text your model ingests from the internet...
It's already true of LLMs in general that they represent a privilege escalation opportunity to any text they ingest. But with human in the loop, and a well-formed sandbox, the blast radius and risk are both reduced..
Convenience is the root of much evil.
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Worst thing that ever happened was that my passwords were sent to Claude. It tried really hard to ssh into a server that it didn't know the password to.
Lucky for me that my passwords only give access to.... Idk my Gmail with 2fa?
Even my private browsing is vinilla hot girls.
It's the lethal trifecta on steroids, sold to you as a feature.
Together with your point about convenience, it's the lethal quadfecta, as we can take the prevalence of convenience as a given.
Not only is it unsecured root access to your computer, it also adds a thousand layers of "security" (which will break on every update) to pretend that it's safe.
code was secured for convenience not convenience for secure code
Convenience always wins until it doesn't. I learned this the hard way — had an API key leak because an agent decided to "helpfully" paste it into a log output. Didn't notice until the bill came.
Now I run everything in isolated containers with scoped tokens. Not because I'm paranoid, but because I'm lazy. Rotating a key is annoying, rebuilding a container is not.
What's the actual breaking point for people here? Root access? API keys? Or just "can see my data"?
The risk here is wildly overstated, prompt injection risk is becoming vanishingly small with the latest frontier models.
I would not run an OpenClaw with full access to my bitwarden, but it certainly has some logins available to it, and can make purchases with link-cli which has human-in-the-loop.