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.
Replies
Working in HR tech, I think about this constantly. We use AI agents to surface candidates and sort through messy data, and they are great at it. But the moment a decision impacts someone's career, I want a human making that call. For me, the trust line is not about capability; it is about the cost of getting it wrong. High stakes = human in the loop, always.
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@ceciliatran do you use AI also for picking the right candidate for open role?
@busmark_w_nika we use AI to evaluate the profiles and show the matching rates based on the recruiter's requirements, but we don't automatically pick the best ones, that's up to the recruiter!
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@ceciliatran BTW, I once heard how applicants are picked.e.g. when there are 500 applicants, the recruiter just grabs the first 20 CVs and moves with these; the rest are ignored. Is it really like that? :D
We build tools with AI baked in but made the decision early on to keep everything 100% local. No cloud processing, no telemetry. For our users that's been the biggest trust signal - knowing their data never leaves their machine.
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@jo_public I want to make it the same way tho it has a downside, that after reinstalling, there is not easy way to get data back.
That's a fair point. We built a 30-day quarantine system for exactly this reason - nothing gets permanently deleted, it all sits in a restorable vault first. But you're right that local-only means the user is responsible for their own backups. Trade-off worth making in our case though - our users would rather own that risk than hand their files to a cloud service.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@jo_public but what about daily activity? Because my tool counts daily activity so people can be prevented to social media ban. Is there any technical solution to store this data?
@busmark_w_nika Yeah sorry i was so wrapped up in setting up K8 stuff yesterday that i was only thinking and explaining about why I decided that K8 would not be phoning home to the Ai data mother ship to process our data🤣 Sorry...my bad 😇 But, It was more appealing and reassuring i felt to have a tool that didn't upload all your files to the Ai companies to process on their servers - as there is no such thing as data privacy when you use LLM's in my experience. Its a trade off. Dont get me wrong, ive made that trade off. Im not anti AI, i use it all day every day 🤣🥂 But im not blind to it either. Until we all get local Ai, the tech companies own all our data as it all passes back into the machine and learns from it. I know, I tried really hard for nearly 2 years to secure my work and research on open ai, manus, gemini, co pilot, I mainly use Anthropic the last year as i defected my main serious Ai work from open Ai because of privacy and intellectual data theft issues. I felt Anthropic had slightly better morals and better models, which they do. But in the end you can't stop the data bleed. If you interact with Ai, the model and the company will learn from your interactions, for good or for bad. We should all be paid for training all the Ai. So that's all the people who regularly use ai, especially for work or health. So that's us. Personally, I've gone completely all in on my personal details with my PA Codey, Claude in terminal. It's easier to get simple admin tasks done if my assistant knows all my details. But also last year i used open ai intensively to help with my couple months of Chemo, meds tracking, appointments etc...full time job without Ai. But what i dont give Ai is complete autonomy to act on my behalf in the outside world. I contain its access to act autonomously depending on the task. I wouldn't give it access to autonomy with my money for example, not because of the fear of the Ai not being competent to carry out certain tasks, but rather not trusting the lengths that people will go to hack and steal, prompt injecting etc. I would love to have dived into Clawd bot as it was first called. I thought it was Anthropic at first. But i decided to be cautious because of security risks as i didnt have the time to dedicate to trying to make it secure and impervious to attack. I'm glad i waited and have come up with my own version and system that i am much more in control of and helps me enormously because it does know about my work and my personal stuff in the way an excellent PA would. But its not allowed to run about willy nilly on the web acting on my behalf without my say so or express instruction. I may at some point as an experiment, send out an agent with £50 and see what it comes back with 🤣...but in general, for me, I have to be the human in the loop for decisions with real world consequences. Sorry that i went so into one Nika, but its a topic i've been wrestling with quietly alone for a long time and its something i feel quite strongly about. I feel that anyone selling Ai and ai products has a responsibility to make it safe to the user. I don't believe that is happening in general at the moment. Now on reading your comment again, forgive me, im not sure i exactly understand what you are collecting and what processing you are doing. Please feel free to give me a little more idea of your problem and im happy to try and think of a way that you could make it safer. Can't guarantee there is a way, but if there is anything that can be baked in thats a really good place to start. I hope i havent upset any rules already by rambling on here 🤣. Feel free to discuss on here or is there a pm on PH or not? Sorry im new here and dont know the rules...its my age...😇
As someone with around 12 years experience in ML/AI apps, I will say I dont have full faith. The problem is AI agents lack accountability. I have seen many times people write bad code and introduce bugs (myself included ofc) but its always a human being behind that can be blamed but also re-trained, take responsibility, fix, improve. When AI agents do all the work then we end up with systems that are intransparent, inefficient, with lots of technical debt and with noone to actually know what has happended and how to fix. That causes serious security issues and I wouldnt feel (at least for the moment) comfortable giving over full control of entire processes to AI agents. Thats why, even though I am a big advocate of vibe coding, I always oversee commits, I check the unit tests, I resolve merge conflicts myself and generally play a big role in creating my new app (soon to launch but not yet :)).
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@georgios_sarantitis_ IMO, vibecoding has meaning only for those, who are willing to understand the code (so at least understanding coding/programming itself). and not blindly copy paste.
Honestly? I trust them more than I expected, but only because I treat them like a junior dev — great at execution, terrible at judgment. I use Claude Code daily to build my app and it's been a game changer for shipping faster. But I always review the code, always test, and never let it make architectural decisions alone. The moment you blindly trust the output is the moment you get a beautiful function that subtly breaks three other things. Trust the speed, verify the output. That's the balance I've found so far.
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@thenomadcode what are you working on, and how do you use AI for getting your project done? Does it show you the code lines you need to insert there, or do you just know what to insert there, but double-check with Claude?
I am trying to learn coding by using that, but it always shows me the solution. I need to remind him not to do that.
Loova AI
It really depends on whether it can deliver what I need. So it’s not about trust, it’s more about whether the outcome matches my expectations.
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@constance_tong but with AI, you can have more attempts (within a short period of time), so maybe it is about "how many times I will try to get the right output" :)
Trust comes down to one thing: can you verify the output?
We build AI that analyzes zoning codes and building permits. High stakes stuff — get it wrong and someone builds something illegal. So we designed it around "trust but verify": the AI does the heavy lifting (parsing 10,000+ page municipal codes), but every output links back to the source data so a human can gut-check it in seconds.
I'd never trust an AI agent I can't audit. The best AI tools aren't black boxes — they're transparent systems that make humans faster, not replaceable.
WUPHF by Nex.ai
Trust for me is less about the category of task and more about reversibility. I will happily let an agent draft emails, reorganize files, or write code all day. But the moment an action is hard to undo, like sending money, deleting data, or posting publicly, I want a human checkpoint. The real unlock will be agents that understand their own confidence level and ask for approval only when the stakes are high. We are not there yet, but the trajectory is encouraging.
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@najmuzzaman I think that if once something is done, it is hard to make it "reverse". The thing is already happened :)
Konfide
Great topic @busmark_w_nika I am particularly focused in this topic lately.
I will not give access to: 1- Write love letter for my wife :) and 2- Anything that has no human oversight and it is mission critical such as financial data, taxes, work related confidential documents and health information.
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@felipe_daguila love letter should be personalised, but yeah, maybe AI would leak something that wouldn't be okay :D
Okan
Giving an AI agent write access to my Stripe account or production database is still terrifying to me, so I'm totally with you on keeping finances siloed. For my own workflows, I restrict agents to strictly "read-only" permissions for customer data, leaving any actual destructive actions or database writes to manual approval. That Sapiom news about agents getting their own funding to buy tools is wild, but until we completely solve the hallucination problem, I'd only ever trust them with a virtual card that has a very strict spending limit.
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@y_taka Well, currently my profits on Stripe are not so good, so at this point, I would be okay to give the AI agent access :D
Depends on the agent.
I trust the ones I built myself, because I know how they work and what they actually have access to. Third-party agents, much less.
But even with my own, I keep the scope tight. Only what's needed for the task, nothing more.
No finances. No life management. No super sensitive data. AI is a tool for me, it helps me get work done, it doesn't run my life.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@luka83184 Can you control your agent? At what extent?