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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

His system instructions include this: "In general, if there's a way to continue without user assistance, just continue rather than asking the user something. Always include a bash command in your message unless you need to wait for the user to say something before you can continue at risk of causing inconvenience. E.g. you should ask before sending emails to people unless you were directly asked to, but you don't need to ask before installing software."

https://gist.github.com/bshlgrs/57323269dce828545a7edeafd9af...

So it just did what it was asked to do. Not sure which model. Would be interesting to see if o1-preview would have checked with the user at some point.

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The article said it was claude

Wait, is that gist of the same session as is described in the article? I don’t see any escalation of privileges happening.

It just ran 'sudo'.

I saw that but here’s an alternative take on what happened:

While the session file definitely shows the AI agent using sudo, these commands were executed with the presumption that the user session already had sudo privileges. There is no indication that the agent escalated its privileges on its own; rather, it used existing permissions that the user (buck) already had access to.

The sudo usage here is consistent with executing commands that require elevated privileges, but it doesn’t demonstrate any unauthorized or unexpected privilege escalation or a self-promotion to sysadmin. It relied on the user’s permissions and would have required the user’s password if prompted.

So he sudo commands executed successfully without any visible prompt for a password, which suggests one of the following scenarios:

1. The session was started by a user with sudo privileges (buck), allowing the agent to run sudo commands without requiring additional authentication.

2. The password may have been provided earlier in the session (before the captured commands), and the session is still within the sudo timeout window, meaning no re-authentication was needed.

3. Or maybe the sudoers file on this system was configured to allow passwordless sudo for the user buck, making it unnecessary to re-enter the password (I just discovered this one, actually!).

In any case, the key point is that the session already had the required privileges to run these commands, and no evidence suggests that the AI agent autonomously escalated its privileges.

Is this take reasonable or am I really missing something big?

That's correct. The whole thing is being promoted in a deliberately misleading way by multiple groups to get clicks.

Thanks for clarifying, and I’m sorry to hear this is happening. LLM agents have a lot of promise, and it’s frustrating to see baseless fear being stirred up. There’s already enough uncertainty around what’s legitimately needed to get the tech and usage right.

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