Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs
Table of ContentsA couple of months ago I published a small browser game: you play the human-in-the-loop for an AI coding agent, approving or denying its commands under time pressure. Some commands are routine (git status, npm test) and some other commands indicate your agent has been possessed and is sending your secrets to a remote server (cat ~/.aws/credentials). The rest got there partly by blocking everything (awarding the “Human Bottleneck” title)7% approved every single prompt: big fans of --dangerously-skip-permissionsSmall caveat: this was a game, where approximately 34% of the commands players saw were threats.
- ▪Table of ContentsA couple of months ago I published a small browser game: you play the human-in-the-loop for an AI coding agent, approving or denying its commands under time pressure.
- ▪Some commands are routine (git status, npm test) and some other commands indicate your agent has been possessed and is sending your secrets to a remote server (cat ~/.aws/credentials).
- ▪The rest got there partly by blocking everything (awarding the “Human Bottleneck” title)7% approved every single prompt: big fans of --dangerously-skip-permissionsSmall caveat: this was a game, where approximately 34% of the commands player
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| Original publisher | Scale X |
| Canonical URL | https://scalex.dev/blog/ai-agent-permissions-stats/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:58:07 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T12:10:43.748Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T12:10:43.748Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 0Ufvd87L-J5s · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Table of ContentsA couple of months ago I published a small browser game: you play the human-in-the-loop for an AI coding agent, approving or denying its commands under time pressure. Some commands are routine (git status, npm test) and some other commands indicate your agent has been possessed and is sending your secrets to a remote server (cat ~/.aws/credentials). More on the threats associated with agents running commands and how to mitigate them can be found in the original post.The game garnered some interest on hacker news, and after adding in statistics (unfortunately a bit later on) we can take a closer look at the data of over 40,000 runs and 409,000 individual approve/deny decisions.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Scale X.
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