How much do you trust AI agents?
With the advent of clawdbots, it's as if we've all lost our inhibitions and "put our lives completely in their hands."
I'm all for delegating work, but not giving them too much personal/sensitive stuff to handle.
I certainly wouldn't trust something to the extent of providing:
access to personal finances and operations (maybe just setting aside an amount I'm willing to lose)
sensitive health and biometric information (can be easily misused)
confidential communication with key people (secret is secret)
Are there any tasks you wouldn't give AI agents or data you wouldn't allow them to access? What would that be?
Re. finances – Yesterday I read this news: Sapiom raises $15M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools – so this may be a new era when funds will go rather to Agents than to founders.
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I think that its moreso that people are extremely eager to have someone or something solve and handle their problems and challenges. AI agents are positioned as the ultimate solution and so people are willing to take any risk involved if it means solving any painful challenges they face in their day to day.
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@michael_cervantes I still believe that some people are patient and more conscious about their decision to use AI for everything. But there is maybe like 5% of those people. lol
i run an AI agent 24/7 on my machine and honestly the trust thing is less binary than people make it. its not "trust or dont trust" - its about scoping what the agent can touch.
the biggest unlock for me was treating it like hiring a junior dev. you dont give them prod database access on day one. same with agents - start with read-only stuff, let it draft things, review for a week, then slowly open up write access to specific tools. ive had mine managing my calendar, checking emails, even doing research tasks for weeks now and the failure mode isnt "it goes rogue" - its more like it misunderstands context and does something slightly wrong. which is... exactly what humans do too.
the finance stuff i agree with though. anything involving money stays manual. not because the agent cant do it but because the cost of a mistake is too high and theres no undo button.
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@umairnadeem IMO, it is crazy how people give access to databases. Esp. with data of other people/users. I wouldn't trust it so much :D
@busmark_w_nika people give other people access to databases too, and other people are prone to social engineering just like LLMs are prone to prompt injections. if anything, LLMs are already more reliable than people in this regard.
The trust question is domain-specific and stakes-calibrated. I'm building an AI travel planner — the threshold there is very different from finance or health: if the agent picks a slightly off restaurant, the downside is a disappointing dinner, not a ruined credit score. But there's a subtler trust problem I think gets underexplored: preference trust. Not 'will it misuse my data' but 'does it actually model what I want, or is it confidently wrong about my taste?' That second failure is harder to catch — the agent feels like it's working until you realize it's been optimizing for the wrong thing for weeks.
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@giammbo When do you launch btw? :)
Aiming for the coming weeks — still tightening the experience before going public. Will definitely ping you when we're ready to go live on PH — having the right voices behind it early makes a real difference.
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@giammbo Yes, please, ideally on LI :)
@busmark_w_nika Will do — I'll connect on LI before we go live. Really appreciate you saying that.
I trust everything I can control and validate. May be it is a little bit conservative, but it works for me
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@ilia_ilinskii I am the same (old-school) cool
Decently personal communications, maybe just bots for business needs.
About financial part I’m good to delegate but asking for approve with details for each move
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@alexeyglukharev I stand for the opinion that things we care about quite much, I would like to do them in person/manually :) Or things I enjoy.
hot take but i think everyone here is worried about the wrong thing. the real risk with agents isnt data leakage or rogue bank transfers. its compounding errors over time that look fine individually but add up to something broken. ive been running coding agents continuously for months and the scariest moments werent security incidents, they were subtle logic drift where the agent confidently made a series of reasonable-looking decisions that were collectively wrong. nobody noticed until the output was way off.
the fix isnt restricting access, its making every action reversible. trash over rm, drafts over sends, branches over direct commits. if you design your workflow so nothing is permanent until a human says so, you can give agents surprisingly broad access without losing sleep.
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@umairnadeem Or it would be cool to give one bot to give a promt create a code and to another 2 or 3 bots: Check bugs. Would be a cool experiment :)
I do AI trainings for teams so this trust thing comes up like every single session.
Agents are getting really good but honestly how much you trust them depends way more on how you set up the context — guardrails, instructions, steering — than on the model itself. Like maybe 30% is the model and 70% is your prep work.
Best analogy I have is hiring a summer intern from college. Smart kid, learns fast, sometimes even brilliant. But then you realize you spend 2x more time supervising this intern than just doing the thing yourself :D
Trust comes when you stop expecting magic and start treating them like a junior teammate who needs really good onboarding docs.
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@jarmo_tuisk2 OKay, not gonna lie, when I take into account my internships... I would trust AI more :D
@busmark_w_nika :D :D maybe you are right
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@jarmo_tuisk2 I am 100% right lol :D
@busmark_w_nika haha fair enough. at least AI doesn't steal your lunch from the office fridge
Copus
Trust really depends on what kind of data the agent needs access to. I draw a hard line at financial accounts and health records — too much downside risk.
But for content discovery and curation? I actually think AI agents add a lot of value there. We built Copus partly around this idea — helping people organize and rediscover the things they save across the web. The agent does the heavy lifting of surfacing relevant content, but the human still decides what matters.
The key is designing systems where AI handles the tedious parts (sorting, tagging, recommending) while keeping humans in control of the final decisions. Guardrails > blind trust.
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@handuo Isn't it something that clawd can be used too?
I’m excited about AI agents too, but I definitely have a few boundaries.
For me, anything involving direct control over money is a no-go. I might let an AI analyze spending or suggest actions, but I wouldn’t give it full access to move funds or make financial decisions on its own.
Same with sensitive health or biometric data. The upside isn’t worth the risk if that information gets misused or leaked.
And private conversations with important people (business partners, legal matters, personal messages) should stay private. Some things just shouldn’t pass through another system.
I’m happy letting AI handle research, drafting, organizing, and repetitive tasks. But when it comes to money, identity, or truly confidential information, I prefer to keep a human in the loop.
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@sangeet_banerjee I feel a little bit dumb, because, confession: I copy-paste some conversations because I do not understand some people and nuances 😅 That said: You are more cautious and concious about usage :)
"Trust" is an interesting word for AI Agents. I would say, I do not trust them, ever. At any point the data you feed that ai agent for the product you are building can be taken. You are relying on Anthropic, OpenAi, etc. to stay honest to us as users. Trust for me is pretty minimal when it comes to AI Agents. BUT.... I love how much of an impact it's made in my daily work. Always remember, the human brain, touch and eye means more than producing something in 1 second. For any industry.
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@liron_ben_moshe I suppose that many people will blindly trust just because of the comfort that it offers. 🤷♀️
@busmark_w_nika They certainly will. Problem is, once the user builds something so fast with the agent and problems occur that the agent cannot fix, said user will not know the solution, or it'll take them 2x as long to research and learn how to fix it.