Is your agent's grep tool a shell command?

When you give an LLM a tool, you hand it a real function and let it choose the arguments. Those tools are everything your agent can do to a real system: read a file, write to your database, send an email, run a shell command, delete data. They are your risk surface, and most teams have never looked at it in one place. So we did. We ran scan across a batch of popular open-source TypeScript AI agents. A few of the things it found, none of them exotic: A coding agent whose grep and glob tools, which sound read-only, actually shell out through execSync . Its bash tool passes a model-chosen string straight to spawn . Arbitrary command execution, behind three innocuous names. A query tool that fires an HTTP DELETE . A "query" that deletes. A calculator that runs eval on whatever the model types, in a widely-used agent framework. Arbitrary code execution behind the friendliest name in the box. A send-email tool that posts to an array of recipients, so the model chooses who gets mailed. The single most common finding, in almost every agent we scanned: a fetch tool aimed at whatever URL the model supplies. That is a door to your internal network (an SSRF surface). Notice the pattern. The dangerous tools are not named dangerous . They are named grep , query , calculator . A name is a claim. The code is the evidence. See your own agent's tools scan reads that evidence. One command, no install, no signup, no code change: npx @agentx-core/scan . It lists every tool the model can call and ranks each one by what it can do, from read-only up to destructive: 🔍 AGENTX SCAN (TypeScript · 3 files · 5 tools) =========================================================================== RISK TOOL GUARD WHY ---- ---- ------ ------------------------ high calculator yes calls `eval` lib/tools/compute.ts:4 high grep yes calls `execSync` lib/tools/system.ts:8 med sendEmail yes calls `mailer.send` lib/tools/io.ts:5 med fetchUrl yes outbound req to agent-controlled host (SSRF) lib/tools/io.ts:11 2