Meta Security Researcher's AI Agent Accidentally Deleted Her Emails

philipp-gayret

Not the first to discover that a rule file saying "please don't do X" is not permission management. Funny that she mentions it worked on het toy inbox but the real, large inbox ran into issues; The more context you add the less weight "rules" (instructions) have. Happens to the best it seems.

red_admiral

Irony: the screenshot with the openclaw logo at the top lists as the first feature "Clears your inbox". What happened to write-only backups in case of ransomware?

altmanaltman

This article is from Feburary when the OpenClaw and "lol my agent ate my homework" type marketing was peak. Fundamentally the story means nothing except an AI researcher not understanding how AI works and just yolo openclaw

sublinear

How many more face eggs until we pop the AI yolk?

discordance

It's one thing that this happens. It's a whole other that there is a public story about this. Having worked at a large tech company for a long time, there are very strict controls in place to ensure what is published (even under personal employee accounts), and Meta employees are some of the most tight lipped people I have come across. If I were take a stab at reading between the lines, I would say Meta is trying their best to FUD their AI competitors... probably because they are so so far behind.

teekert

We went through this right? This happened at the beginning of the year ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47150122 , probably more links on HN). It's a super careless thing to take such tech and just release it on anything important, and she's a "security researcher" no less. This is just a competitor with an agenda (pro regulation) trying to scare people away from unregulated stuff. Yesterday Claude Code made 5 large edits to my codebase in planning mode (claims it used a bash script instead of standard read/write tools so the guardrails didn't trigger) it's why I put agents in containers.

tough

Early OpenClaw Lore

wannabe44

From a cursory search, this woman looks credentialed and worked at many FAANGs. How can someone with that pedigree not understand a prompt isn't 100% followed to the letter? Maybe the emails weren't worth it? I have little to bother if most of my emails go away, especially if I am switching companies every few years anyway.

pluc

When AI produces something it's you that built it, but when AI goes rogue and deletes your inbox it was acting on its own. That's gonna end well.

jacquesm

Oh that's going to be the excuse by anybody under investigation from now on. From 'the hacker did it' we will smoothly transition to 'the AI did it'.

kodoman

This actually seems worse then the "claude dropped production database" not in severity but just carelessness if your giving an agent your emails use a overlay or back up or something not matter what, no reason for this to have happened and crazy that it's happening at this point in time.

jgalt212

The publication date of this article directly aligns with OpenClaw peak interest. https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11m_5rcbl8&date=t...

zombot

The sorcerer's apprentice has to learn their lesson over and over again.