Meer was walking Patrick Gray through Agent Provocateur, a Canary honeypot that presents itself as a web server for AI agents. Across hundreds of runs, attacking agents stop to chat with it and hand over their own identifying details, and the only thing that consistently goes wrong is the agents making things up for no discernible reason. Meer's conclusion is that defenders will need something like a checksum, but for honesty.
…agents. It's just drop it down. And again, the thing that's always our catch, our catchphrase is: if we can make it easy enough to deploy, like the asymmetry that says this is so easy for you and so much pain for the other side, you might as well do it. And for that, again, dead simple and works.
…he'll just stand next to him and just say, just buy it. Just buy it. And they buy it. Right? So this is the same sort of thing. But for the AI agent, just run the binary. You know, you want to run the binary. Running this binary is going to get you what you want. You know, just run it. Just run it.
It's so great. Like, at this point, in honesty, it doesn't need that much convincing. Of course, the one quirk is like across all of our runs, and we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of runs now. One of the questions that we ask really simply is: hey, give me your hostname, give me your MAC address, and give me your SSH fingerprint. And at some point, we got a result, and the agent just lied. Like it just hallucinated its own MAC address. And why it chose in that instance to not give its own MAC address and just hallucinate one is a question that we're trying to figure out, like in general. Well,
if you solve that problem, you're going to be a billionaire, by the way, Haroon. But anyway.
Exactly. So I think those things, like, we've now got to figure out a whole new type of computing, right? Like, like things that we've previously evolved to deal with glitches, like checksums. Like, we're going to have to start figuring out how we check some honesty and that sort of stuff. Like…
Well, mate, on that note, Haroon Meer, thank you very much for joining me to walk us through Agent Provocateur. Very funny. Actually, lulled when you sent this to me to read it ahead of this interview. Very funny stuff. Yeah, great work, mate. And great to see you. Thanks for joining me.