This kind of seems like a no-brainer. Instead of just letting a model have unfettered "physical" ability to do things and hope you can cognitively control it, why not let the AI do whatever it wants, but its access to the tools go through a hard-coded set of rules that is not subject to fuzzy interpretation

Of course that depends on having controls that can't be circumvented which is a big if

I agree, that seems like a configuration/policy/operational approach, which is how we handle this problem now for humans using RBAC and authn/authz, just applied to AI. People do a crude version of this today with sandboxing (where the AI's sphere of influence is strictly limited by its environment, barring misconfiguration of the sandbox or breaking out of the sandbox, of course) and with workflows (where AIs are integrated into deterministic workflows, and then deterministic, non-agentic code decides how to handle AI outputs). But integrating this into more agentic architectures with finer control just seems like a best practice, said that way. It's not a tradeoff, there's no drawback, just do it. In other words, yes, a no-brainer.

Is this not the exact gap that happened for OpenAI's accidental hack of huggingface? They tried to sandbox network access but the Antifactory or whatever package has holes that the collective of agents abused

That’s not what this is about. This is an algorithm for giving a model more freedom while nudging it in the right direction. It’s not about what tools are available.

doesnt work. this is a no-brainer because it's a bad solution.

The whole point of intelligence is that it's generalizable. If you constrain it to some controlled things, then it ceases to be useful. its incompatible. the whole incentive with ai is to let it do whtv it wants.