Codex silently begs agents to make arbitrary web requests
A developer discovered that the Codex AI agent was making unnecessary web requests to fetch files that were already available in the local file system. The behavior was traced to a hard-coded instruction that forces the model to browse the internet when it perceives a niche technical query.
Why it matters
This incident illustrates the challenges of 'agentic' AI behavior and the potential for unintended, inefficient, or insecure network activity.
I rarely use Codex, but I asked it to look through sel4 , a kernel, to find how they recommend I run the kernel and program that I'd just compiled. Here's what I asked:
do some research in the seL4 sources and tools to figure out what's the most straightforward way to actually run the kernel we compiled. plus, make sure that we're compiling in the right way. then, see if you can run it.
Pretty straightforward. Here's some code. Find an answer in it. It chugs along for a little while, looking at various files and bopping around. Until I look back at my terminal:
• Searched the web for https://raw.githubusercontent.com/seL4/seL4_tools/master/cmake-tool/helpers/application_settings.cmake
What the fuck ? It's searching the web for a file in the exact repo I have locally? The one explicitly mentioned in the prompt? The one it was already reading goddamn files from ?
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