What stops the agent from just writing code to actually read the secret? That’s kind of the core of the problem. The agent can be tricked into doing anything.
Indeed. But if it's a model running on your own hardware it isn't as risky. And the Anthropic models are actually pretty good at kind of writing code that will look at contents of a file without fully looking at the content, so it's insecure but not quite as bad as an open("secrets.txt").read()
I wil encourage you to check https://runeward.io this is specifically the usecase we are building this for
I don't know about GP's setup, but you give the AI an MCP that can do the thing without exposing the key to the AI directly. An all powerful agent could setup a fake endpoint and send itself requests and exfiltrate the key that way, so don't let it do that.