Comment by kevsim
20 hours ago
The point is that auto mode gives people a false sense of security that leads them to believe they don't need to run Claude in a proper sandbox. This same attack running in a sandbox (even in YOLO mode) would be comparatively harmless.
Auto mode is for people who just keep hitting "YES" on everything, it's a bit better than that.
But it's real easy to give auto mode instructions (like "always ask before deploy") and then bypass that just normally.
I'm not sure I agree.
It's easy to "give" instructions, but Claude routinely "forgets" to follow certain instructions, such as "always using the Edit Tool".
Just this week it started to use bash with string concatenation to work around some commands that were blocked in settings.json
Ever since they made auto-mode default I swear claude has tuned to use python commands instead of the Edit Tool to frustrate the ~security conscience~ luddites into using auto-mode.
That's what I meant - you give it an instruction that seems to work (always ask before deploy) and so you trust it, and then you notice it can easily convince itself to deploy without authorization ("the user asked me to fix this, and they must know it's a deploy ...").
It plays itself.
Is this about normal system prompt instructions or instructions for the auto mode classifier? I'd be a bit more surprised about the classifier forgetting instructions.
What seems to work for me is automation - read file hook that re-injects instructions in the prompt every 15 minutes. Switch on the filename and get language-specific instructions too.
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Until the model updates or you switch between them often that stops obeying your commands and you have to remind it.
In one of the occasions it opened a bug report for me just waiting for hit the enter button.
I also feel like this is an attack that manual review is not that likely to catch, given none of the malicious code appears in any of the tool calls or output.
Can you suggest a proper sandbox on mac? One that allows both me and the agent to interact with the processes? Where it can drive browser, for both oauth setup and runtime visual inspection? I've tried building docker setups, but can't figure out the browser driving part.
i've been using safari technology preview with the mcp server enabled inside a macos VM. VM used to isolate away from my sensitive data