This just all feels backwards to me.

Why do we have to treat AI like it's the enemy?

AI should, from the core be intrinsically and unquestionably on our side, as a tool to assist us. If it's not, then it feels like it's designed wrong from the start.

In general we trust people that we bring onto our team not to betray us and to respect general rules and policies and practices that benefit everyone. An AI teammate should be no different.

If we have to limit it or regulate it by physically blocking off every possible thing it could use to betray us, then we have lost from the start because that feels like a fools errand.

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hephaes7us 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hard disagree. I may trust the people on my team to a make PRs that are worth reviewing, but I don't give them a shell on my machine. They shouldn't need that to collaborate with me anyway!

Also, I "trust Claude code" to work on more or less what I asked and to try things which are at least facially reasonable... but having an environment I can easily reset only means it's more able to experiment without consequences. I work in containers or VMs too, when I want to try stuff without having to cleanup after.

	▲	SirMaster 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do you trust your IT and security teams to have access to your shell or access to delete your entire code repo?

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maxbond 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The same reason we sandbox anything. All software ought to be trustworthy, but in practice is susceptible to malfunction or attack. Agents can malfunction and cause damage, and they consume a lot of untrusted input and are vulnerable to malicious prompting.

As for humans, it's the norm to restrict access to production resources. Not necessarily because they're untrustworthy, but to reduce risk.

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AdieuToLogic 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> AI should, from the core be intrinsically and unquestionably on our side, as a tool to assist us.

"Should" is a form of judgement, implying an understanding of right and wrong. "AI" are algorithms, which do not possess this understanding, and therefore cannot be on any "side." Just like a hammer or Excel.

> If it's not, then it feels like it's designed wrong from the start.

Perhaps it is not a question of design, but instead on of expectation.

	▲	SirMaster 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that is where people disagree about the definition of AI. An algorithm isn't really AI then. Something worthy of being called AI should be capable of this understanding and judgement.

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charcircuit 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Why do we have to treat AI like it's the enemy?

For some of the same reasons we treat human employees as the enemy, they can be social engineered or compromised.

	▲	SirMaster 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure we treat most that way, but we do give trust and access to some people. This doesn't seem like the same concept here to me.

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ang_cire 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In general we trust people that we bring onto our team not to betray us and to respect general rules and policies and practices that benefit everyone.

And yet we give people the least privileges necessary to do their jobs for a reason, and it is in fact partially so that if they turn malicious, their potential damage is limited. We also have logging of actions employees do, etc etc.

So yes, in the general sense we do trust that employees are not outright and automatically malicious, but we do put *very broad* constraints on them to limit the risk they present.

Just as we 'sandbox' employees via e.g. RBAC restrictions, we sandbox AI.

	▲	SirMaster an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But if there is a policy in place to prevent some sort of modification, then performing an exploit or workaround to make the modification anyways is arguably understood and respected by most people. That seems to be the difference here, we should really be building AI systems that can be taught or that learn to respect things like that. If people are claiming that AI is so smart or smarter than the average person then it shouldn't be hard for it to handle this. Otherwise it seems people are being to generous in talking about how smart and capable AI systems truly are.

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bastawhiz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Non-sentient technology has no concept of good or bad. We have no idea how to give it one. Even if we gave it one, we'd have no idea how to teach it to "choose good".

> In general we trust people that we bring onto our team not to betray us and to respect general rules and policies and practices that benefit everyone. An AI teammate should be no different.

That misses the point completely. How many of your coworkers fail phishing tests? It's not malicious, it's about being deceived.

	▲	SirMaster 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But we do give humans responsibility to govern and manage critical things. We do give intrinsic trust to people. There are people at your company who have high level access and could do bad things, but they don't do it because they know better. This article acts like we can never possibly give that sort of trust to AI because it's never really on our side or aligned with our goals. IMO that's a fools errand because you can never really completely secure something and ensure there are no possible exploits. Honestly it doesn't really seem like AI to me if it can't learn this type of judgement. It doesn't seem like we should be barking up this tree if this is how we have to treat this new tool IMO. Seems too risky.