alt Hacker NewsI disagree. If I turn off web search in the config, then the tool should not search the web, thank you very much. Maybe if I very explicitly ask it to, then it should try.
The whole succeed-at-all-costs idea is a big part of why there have been so many massive security screwups lately.
Well if you disable web search, that's just making that built-in tool unavailable to the agent (when it's enabled, the agent gets usage info and guidance about it in its context). Given a task in which online resources may be useful, the only thing the agent knows is that it could search the web, and that there are a variety of means (curl, wget, urllib in python, etc) which may be at its disposal. Without you telling it specifically not to search the web (or that guidance coming from elsewhere) or blocking internet access, there's no reason it wouldn't use that avenue in fulfilling its task.