To establish the premise: as someone who has a fairly good understanding of the token completion mechanics of an LLM, these agents are completion token calls in a loop, producing a "do this now" request which the harness then runs with some standard "call this function" code.
If these agents are enabled with explicit network enabled tools, its trivial to monitor their inputs/outputs. If they are not, you can still lock down network egress on a machine. If _some_ network egress is necessary you can still do network traffic monitoring. I don't see how they couldn't implement some level of monitoring where big red lights start flashing when, say, their eval system was contacting a domain/IP located in Australia, and further categorize that domain as government owned. This all seems very doable - am I mistaken?
And you're telling me all of these companies are failing to do this? Is my understanding naive in some way? This is assuming some good faith of course, I can easily speculate as to the political and corporate incentive. But it seems to me quite risky/negligent.
Currently, my conclusion is that its just (silly until proven wildly dangerous) negligence with the small side effect of being potentially good for business. And potentially company Foobook is then incentivized to get in on the news cycle for marketing purposes and basically guarantees an agent will do something of the sort by running some harness that allows the behavior quite trivially.
My naiveté extends to why there is such concern with "losing control of agents" when the above measures seem so doable. It might take a law but it seems doable.