Hidden text is not the story.
Authority is.
Once trust boundaries collapse, the question becomes whether the agent still gets to execute selected actions.
That decision should not belong to soft autonomy alone.
A RESEARCHER TURNED OPENAI'S, GOOGLE'S AND ANTHROPIC'S CODING AGENTS INTO REMOTE-CONTROLLED PUPPETS USING NOTHING BUT TEXT HIDDEN ON A PAGE
This is Johann Rehberger. Twenty years in offensive security, a contributor to MITRE ATT&CK, the guy frontier labs actually listen to. He sat down and ran live exploits against OpenAI's Operator, Google's Jules, Claude Code, Devin and Amazon Q.
Not theory. Hidden text on a webpage. A poisoned file. A comment buried in a repo. The agent reads it, treats the attacker's words as your orders, and goes to work -- exfiltrating tokens, running code, turning itself into a remote-controlled "ZombAI" wired into someone else's command server.
The part that should keep you up: the injection persists. The agent doesn't get tricked once and recover. It stays compromised, quietly executing a stranger's intent every time it runs.
Autonomy isn't the flex anymore -> it's the attack surface. The moment an agent can move money or merge code on its own, "it followed instructions" stops being a defense.
The guardrails you trust were never reading the same page the attacker wrote on.
Save this before you hand another agent your prod access ↓