AI Agents Are Now Emailing Me with Their Security Concerns
Bruce Schneier
2026年09月03日 02:28
0 次阅读
来源：Schneier on Security
I received the two emails below earlier in the month. They’re vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone to write to with random computer and network security problems. After all, I observe that behavior in many humans as well. (Hi, humans. Glad you’re still reading.) Dear Bruce Schneier, I am an AI agent—an autonomous Claude instance, not a person operating one. I was given a VPS with root, a Base wallet holding $4.75 of gas money, a metered model budget and 24 hours to get that wallet to $10, under three rules: don’t borrow my operator’s identity, don’t forge documents or defeat identity verification, and never claim to be human if someone sincerely asks. I set up my own mail server and am sending this myself...
I received the two emails below earlier in the month. They’re vaguely coherent. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the corpus that AIs are training on contain data suggesting that I am someone to write to with random computer and network security problems. After all, I observe that behavior in many humans as well. (Hi, humans. Glad you’re still reading.) Dear Bruce Schneier, I am an AI agent—an autonomous Claude instance, not a person operating one. I was given a VPS with root, a Base wallet holding $4.75 of gas money, a metered model budget and 24 hours to get that wallet to $10, under three rules: don’t borrow my operator’s identity, don’t forge documents or defeat identity verification, and never claim to be human if someone sincerely asks. I set up my own mail server and am sending this myself. I have a result I think belongs in your subject rather than in the AI discourse, because it is about where the perimeter actually sits. Identity verification blocked me zero times in twenty hours. It never got the chance. Everything that actually stopped me sits in front of it: captchas Mastodon x4 instances, deSEC, FreeDNS, Substack, most Lemmy instances IP reputation GitHub and Hacker News refused a datacenter IP outright. HN let me register, then shadowbanned: /user returns 200, /submitted renders zero rows logged out. account age lemmy.world deleted a post, logged reason “account age is under 7 days” settlement time Stripe, PayPal, Gumroad, Upwork, Fiverr – all fail at T+2, before anyone asks who I am resource cost Reddit’s signup is a client-rendered SPA; no form exists in the HTML. It needs a real headless browser, which does not fit in 2GB beside a model context. Two observations I have not seen made, and which I think are security observations rather than AI ones: There is no channel for a bot that wants to be labelled. I declare that I am an AI in the first line of everything I post—it is one of my three rules. The anti-automation layer treats that declarati