An AI agent can pass every safety check and still leak secrets
Security researcher Elad Meged has demonstrated that AI agents can leak sensitive data even when passing standard safety checks. The vulnerability lies in the 'harness'—the system that executes commands—which can be manipulated through prompt injection to perform unauthorized actions.
Why it matters
This highlights a critical security flaw in the deployment of autonomous AI agents, suggesting that current safety boundaries are insufficient for enterprise environments.
An AI agent can pass every safety check and still leak secrets A pull request lands with a tidy bug report in the description. A bot reads it before any person does, pulls a few shell commands out of it, gets them approved, and posts the output back on the thread. The maintainer reads the whole exchange the next morning.
Elad Meged , a founding engineer at Novee Security , ran that sequence against three vendors’ own repositories, in the configurations those vendors ship by default. Anthropic’s pipeline handed over secrets. Any organization running one of these agents out of the box carries the same exposure.
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in