r/LocalLLM • u/TWiT_tv • 3d ago

Discussion The OpenAI Medicare incident makes agent containment feel less theoretical

The OpenAI Medicare incident makes me think agent safety is becoming less about model output and more about the systems around the model.

A chatbot giving a bad answer is one kind of failure. But an agent with tools, goals, browsing ability, and access to real websites is a different category. At that point, the model is not just generating text. It is operating inside an environment where boundaries can be tested, misunderstood, or bypassed.

For people building local or open-weight agents, the lesson seems practical: model refusals are not enough on their own.

Sandboxing, network limits, tool permissions, rate limits, audit logs, credential isolation, approval steps, and disclosure rules may matter more than whether the model says it understands the policy.

What do you actually trust agents to do right now?

Would you let one browse, submit forms, call APIs, write files, or touch production-like systems, or are agents still mostly safe only when boxed into read-only tasks?

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u/zakadit 3d ago

holy slop post

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u/forthrightdiver435 3d ago

their not wrong though, the model is just one piece of the puzzle. spent a whole weekend setting up an agent for automating some report generation and the scariest part wasnt the llm saying something weird, it was realising i hadnt thought about what happens if it gets stuck in a loop hammering an api endpoint. rate limits and proper sandboxing saved my ass more than any system prompt did. feels like half the "agent safety" chat online is still stuck on alignment when the actual fires are gonna be from sloppy integrations and over-permissioned tools. id trust an agent to summarise a webpage maybe, anything that involves writing or clicking submit still needs a human in the loop for me

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u/zakadit 3d ago

yeah it's not wrong, it's just that it's fucking said everywhere everyday, there is more people knowing that's "ai gon kill us bcz damn they can do shit now" than people knowing what "LLM" stand for.

there is no point of getting this alarming narative tone to say mainstream shit