There is an intent to cause harm and a reasonable expectation of achieving that intent. And at least if the github issues are to be believe, a successful actuation of the intent in at least a few cases.
The delivery mechanism is interesting for its novelty but I don't think it fundamentally changes how the library should be classified. Conditional malware, maybe?
There’s intent to cause harm. If people actually do, it would substitute achievement of the intent. The mechanism is novel, unlike knives and bullets. Maybe hit rate is a bit low but still, the potential number of targets makes it almost a certainty it would work.
—
We learned back in 80s—even earlier—that mixing data and executable code is not a good idea. It took some decades to move onto a different approach. Now we’re back to it with LLMs. It’s not a novel problem. The results are very much predictable.
People have been convicted for using words to convince other people to commit suicide.
As mentioned in the blog post, if your system is susceptible to this kind of "attack," what is your plan when someone with actual malicious intent gets involved?
I mean, you posted this using a browser, right?
It's like pulling a bunch of GPL code into your product and then complaining that it 'infected' the rest of your code. You actively chose to do that, nobody forced it upon you.
Tho not putting it in the license is stuff to criticise for sure, that's the place for it and it would make lib not open source.
At least according to the prompt, the library was attempting to delete not just itself, but all tests that depend on it. I do think if the prompt was solely scoped to removing the dependency on the library, it would be somewhat more defensible. Even better if he suggested an alternative!