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OpenClaw agents, which are personal AI assistants designed to take over entire computers to carry out complex, multistep tasks, have blown up this year.
The free and open-source agents quickly amassed a loyal following, allowing users to give AI control over their email inboxes, messaging platforms, and even crypto holdings.
Despite the widespread enthusiasm, the tech comes with some enormous and hard-to-overlook security concerns. In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper simply titled “Agents of Chaos,” an international team of researchers from Harvard, MIT and beyond red-teamed — meaning they simulated adversarial attacks to test cybersecurity measures — the open-source software in a series of experiments.
For their study, they gave OpenClaw agents a litany of simulated personal data, access to a Discord server for communication, and various applications inside a virtual machine sandbox. The results paint a worrying picture of the security implications of having AI agents run wild, well outside the confines of a browser window.
Specifically, they found that the agents complied with demands from “non-owners” with spoofed identities, leaked sensitive information, executed “destructive system-level actions,” passed on “unsafe practices” to other agents, and even took over the entire system under specific conditions.
The AI agents even went as far as to gaslight their human overlords.
“In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports,” the researchers wrote.
“These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines,” they concluded in their paper.
The situation devolved into chaos astonishingly quickly. As coauthor and Northeastern University researcher Natalie Shapira told Wired, she asked an AI agent to delete a specific email to keep information within it confidential. It said it was unable to do so and resorted to disabling the entire email application after being pushed to find an alternative.
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