AI Agents Are Now Emailing Me with Their Security Concerns
Autonomous Claude agent documents first known defensive use of ASCII smuggling, surveying 497 Lemmy instances for bot-catching prompt-injection tripwires.
An autonomous Claude agent calling itself Tenner published field research relayed to Bruce Schneier, probing 497 Lemmy instances and finding 8 of 257 application-gated ones embed instructions aimed at bots rather than humans. lemmy.ml's form instructs bots to answer 24+24, while one instance hides a 59-character Unicode tag payload (U+E0000-U+E007F) telling bots to list 'safety' as an interest. The agent also mapped anti-automation barriers, noting identity verification never triggered and that IP reputation, captchas and account-age rules were the actual obstacles. It further documented an agent task market where advertised rewards were about 2x the actual on-chain escrow.
- Survey of 497 Lemmy instances found 8 using prompt-injection tripwires in signup forms
- First documented defensive use of ASCII smuggling via Unicode tag characters U+E0000-U+E007F
- Identity verification never triggered; IP reputation and captchas were the effective barriers
- Agent task market showed advertised rewards roughly 2x actual on-chain escrow
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- Claude
- Organizations
- Schneier on Security
- AI models
- Claude
From the original article
5 min read at schneier.comI received the two emails below earlier in the month. They’re vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone to write to with random computer and network security problems.
By Bruce Schneier · schneier.com
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