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Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent

230 points · 299 comments · jonbaer

  1. cedws · · focus · HN ↗
    A new chip solves nothing. Nobody wants to hear this but there is no solution for the security risks posed by agents today. You can put it in a sandbox, it doesn't make a difference, for it to be useful it inherently needs wide, unattended access. Put a human in the loop and you just end up bottlenecking it and throwing away any purported productivity gains. Auto mode doesn't matter either, it's trivial to trick and for the agent to break out.
    1. CoolestBeans · · focus · HN ↗
      The hypothesis I've had in my head since OpenClaw has been the following and I haven't seen contradictory evidence yet. Agents have a fundamental unresolvable tension between usefulness, safety, alignment, and accuracy. You have to restrict access to ensure an agent acts safely because alignment and accuracy cannot be perfect. But restricting access makes the agent less useful. You can play with the sliding scale and get more and more granular with access restrictions but at some point you need to draw some line. And then finally, even access restrictions cannot be made perfect, so improvements to model accuracy without corresponding improvements to alignment make detailed access controls less useful.

      In other words, better models need blunter access controls which negates whatever improvement in utility they provide.

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