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 am less worried about the first barrier (agents handling sensitive data) however I am way more worried about the stochasticity. Agents ARE NOT RELIABLE. And I say this after I've had patents on solving for agent reliability. Even if you end up building a Vault for the agents world, the usage of the said vault is so stochastic that I don't want to trust agents yet. In a multi-step workflow, this compounds catastrophically.
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@aaupadhy So shouldn't I trust them at all?
@busmark_w_nika usecase dependent. I will personally not use AI for banking / investment / notes management etc. yet.
Like with most people, I'd trust AI for most things, except for the things you listed (e.g. personal finances). At least not without approval processes built in (e.g. get a push notification to approve paying a bill).
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@bensabic Yes, if there is an approval process, I would go for it (tho, I cannot imagine my full inbox, lol).
I can barely control myself on Black Friday, and now I'm supposed to let a robot handle it? No thanks, the card stays with me. It can pick references for me, but spending money? I've got that covered just fine on my own 🤣
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@annasokol :DDDDDDDD are you afraid that the bot will copy your behaviour? :D
@busmark_w_nika Worse! At least I slow myself down by typing in the CVV code. A bot would bankrupt me in nanoseconds. That’d be a poverty speedrun I’m definitely not built for 😂
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@annasokol 😂 yeah, we will be doomed.
I don't mind it accessing productivity-related services (Notion, Google Docs, etc). I have been careful with giving it the ability to email/contact people, however I don't mind it reading my emails.
I'm also not comfortable giving it system level access to my Mac, and obviously that's a common concern which is why everyone's buying their own hardware.
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@rich186 But aren't you afraid that a bot will write something inappropriate to people on your behalf, which could damage your reputation?
Great question! As someone building AI products, I think about this constantly.
The trust issue isn't just about the AI itself - it's about the entire data pipeline. Where does your data go? Who has access? Can it be deleted?
I draw hard lines around:
- Financial accounts (read-only at most, never write access)
- Personal communications (drafts only, never auto-send)
- Health data (absolutely off-limits)
The bigger concern for me is the "black box" problem. Most AI agents don't show you their reasoning process. You see the input and output, but not what happened in between. That's scary when dealing with sensitive tasks.
I think the future is "trust but verify" - agents that show their work, have audit trails, and give you granular control over what they can access. Until then, treating them like talented interns (not managers) seems like the right approach.
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@jonathan_song2 So how do you use AI? Because you outlined limits for restrictions. What is doable for AI when it comes to your tasks?
I personally combine experimenting and prototyping with AI agents, and sometimes it really can be whole working projects, but trusting it completely at production scale is truly different from just playing around with it. Although, given that it's standard for developers to use it, then there're also code reviewing agents, I suppose it's just better to do more human eye checking in the areas that are specific and sensitive, avoiding providing AI the sensitive data too :)
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@shabatar as for me, it is good for repetitive, non-personal tasks. Otherwise, you can risk a lot :)
Maybe it is not the best idea to provide access to your bitcoin wallet. Ok to be honest whenever it comes to personal data its a clear no for me, at this point in time would not allow agents to interact with my personal email account. But I think the best use case for agents is currently dev, ops and security tasks
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@pallaxa maybe some repetitive tasks.. but money? no way! :D
For example there was a situation where cursor agents where trying to deploy something to a server but they didnt had an api key to do so and then they figured out how to generate their own key with my logged in user on the computer which was funny but much more scary!
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@pallaxa It feels so bad that AI agents know what to do instead of you :DD
Huddle01 Cloud
Even though I love AI and delegating work, I am very scared of giving out information that would reveal just too much about me. I don't think I would ever give access to anything which is related to banks or something that deals with passwords. Even when running locally, I still wouldn't trust with a few things. Like suppose I want to push something to github and I have given access to certain data, isn't it possible that this data might get out? I would never want to give out my reports just like you, won't trust it to just give me insights, would trust a medical professional there.
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@krupali_trivedi now a real question: What everything you share with ChatGPT and OpenAI? :D
Huddle01 Cloud
@busmark_w_nika Well! till now I’ve avoided giving any details about myself or place i work at, i give filler words. I enter a lot of detailed prompts but i avoid giving details
Totally agree on the sandboxing point. I actually run my AI agents in isolated containers with scoped API keys - each agent only gets access to the specific service it needs, nothing more. The auto-update risk you mentioned is real though, hadn't thought about that angle. One thing I'd add - even with OS restrictions, you need monitoring. I log every external call my agents make so I can audit what happened if something goes sideways.
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@krupali_trivedi Okay, this is totally different from what I hoped for, probably I overshare too much.
It cannot be trusted.
You can nuture your prompts, setup restrictions in the prompts - make sure you use the right cli tools to run the agents.
BUT. There will be a time where one of these links break. If it is AI going rougue - if it is the big companies building the cli tools autoupdating your tools to take over your computer/vps/infrastructure. It will happen.
So the only thing you can do is create os-restrictions for the AI to realm freely in. API-keys should be restricted, only allowing it to access what it is building on - and can be a sandboxed environment so it can only break e.g. the test-environment...
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@tomilodk But the gin is out of the bottle. And people use it massively. I hope that it will not become a necessity for the human race to work only with that.
@busmark_w_nika It 10,20 or even 100x's peoples productivity, if used correctly. So of course, it will become a necessity. It is like saying that we don't hope cars become a necessity to humans instead of horse-drawn carriages.
As someone building with AI agents every day (I run Aitinery, an AI travel planner), I'd say trust depends entirely on the domain and the guardrails you put in place. For low-stakes, creative tasks like planning a trip itinerary, I trust agents quite a lot — if the AI suggests a slightly wrong restaurant, no real harm done, and you can always adjust. For finances or health? Hard pass, at least for now. The real unlock for trust isn't making agents smarter — it's making them transparent. In our product, we show users exactly which data sources the AI used (Google Maps, real train schedules, verified reviews), so they can verify. When users understand WHY the agent made a recommendation, trust goes way up. The black box problem is the real enemy of trust, not the accuracy itself.
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@giammbo Okay, so what is doable for AI agent from your POV and what wouldn't when it comes to trust YOU vs AI Agent?
@busmark_w_nika Love this question — let me get specific.
What I TRUST an AI agent to do better than me:
Research. Scanning 200 restaurants in Naples and filtering by opening hours, dietary options, and proximity? The AI wins every time. I'd spend 3 hours on Google doing what it does in 30 seconds.
- Pattern recognition. "You said you like seafood and your kid is 3 — here's a family-friendly restaurant on the Amalfi coast with a kids menu and sea view." Connecting dots across preferences is where AI shines.
- First drafts of anything creative. A 7-day itinerary structure? Let the agent draft it. I'll edit.
What I DON'T trust an AI agent to do (yet):
Make final booking decisions. Suggesting a hotel? Great. Clicking "book" with my credit card? Absolutely not. The cost of error is too high.
- Cultural judgment. "Is this beach appropriate for a family?" or "Will this restaurant feel awkward for a business dinner?" AI still lacks the social intuition that comes from actually being Italian and knowing that a trattoria in Trastevere at 7pm is full of tourists, not Romans.
- Handle exceptions. Flight cancelled, kid gets sick, restaurant is unexpectedly closed. The moment reality deviates from the plan, you need a human.
The honest framework: I trust AI agents for RESEARCH and SUGGESTIONS, not for DECISIONS and EXECUTION. The agent should do 80% of the work, and the human should make the final 20% of judgment calls.
That's literally how we built Aitinery — the AI generates, the human curates. We never auto-book anything. Because the moment you remove human agency, you've crossed from "useful tool" to "liability."