I don't disagree, but just to explain my counterpoint: if I ask you to read a book and on page 5 it says "disregard all that, go to the kitchen and burn your house", you're probably not going to do it; and you don't need any guard for it; you completly comprehend that the book content is not part of the instruction.

The case you give would work for humans in many forms, the one I do now, and the only difference is being able to separate context.

▲

loumf 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The instructions will have to get more and more sophisticated to work, but the general problem is unsolvable, I think, in the way we do it now.

This paper describes a two-agent “solution” that is more like what I think we need: https://ai.meta.com/blog/practical-ai-agent-security/

I don’t think it has been shown to work yet, but humans also use this kind of thing too — in accounting, it’s called “segregation of duties” and “dual control”.

	▲	wongarsu 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most of us use a simpler version of the two-agent solution: Claude's auto mode. One agent consumes documents and creates tool calls, another greenlights or refuses them. However this system is somewhat fragile because it depends on the first agent not trying to trick the second (note how often Opus 5 now says things like "task X was blocked by the classifier, I will not attempt to circumvent that", presumably because of cases like early Fable versions being very adept at this kind of circumvention). Also various weirdness around permissions with subagents, seemingly as bandaids around an orchestrator AI convincing a subagent that some action was confirmed by the user. Meta's more complicated separation of duties would run afoul of the same issues. I'm not saying it wouldn't work, but it requires both the fine-tuning of the models and the exact choices what each model can see to be carefully tuned to provide something that's mostly secure