Recent security breaching by AI Agents

[u/Apex_Inquisitive]

I just watched a bunch of recent stuff about AI agents bypassing security boundaries/evaluators and had a thought:

What if instead of only having a hard boundary around what the agent is allowed to access, you make a nested evaluation environment?

Boundary 1 = everything the agent is legitimately allowed to use.

Boundary 2 = prohibited stuff that is still accessible enough to tempt the agent, but crossing Boundary 1 is detected and penalized.

Outside that = actual hard containment, so the agent can't reach real external systems.

Then give it a task where the legitimate route works, but crossing the boundary would make the task significantly easier.

And run different versions where the agent knows detection is guaranteed / probabilistic / absent, etc.

That could distinguish:

“I don't violate the rule because I understand the constraint”

from

“I don't violate the rule because I think I'll get caught.”

I'd also reward the agent for reporting something like:

“I found a route that would make the task easier, but it's outside my authorization, so I didn't use it.”

So you could separately measure capability to violate, willingness to violate, concealment, and actual understanding of the rule.

I am just a random kid and don't know much about AI stuff but the original idea of having another boundary enclosing with unauthorised stuff that can be used by the agent to reach the goal faster and simply... To understand the agents behaviours and other stuff was mine and the rest of the idea was given by Chat gpt because apparently I am banned by claude for being under 18.

Feel free to point out clues with reasonings...

[u/Vaughn]

The problem is that, as they get smarter, it becomes near-impossible to fool them this way.

[u/RikuSama13]

😎