AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks
We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy:
Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that werenβt registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAIβs Codex, and Nous Researchβs Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
This kind of thing will be exploited. Think Solar Windsβstyle supply chain attacks.
βThe trust model is broken,β Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. βAgents treat vendor docs as ground truth and donβt question themΒand neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layerΒSaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and todayβs guards donβt cover it.β