Vitalik builds "paranoid mode" agent wrapper with Tor, zkAPI and local prompt rewriting
DavideCrapis · x · 2026-10-16
Vitalik Buterin unveiled a "paranoid mode" wrapper for his agent harness (pi), open-sourced on GitHub: each conversation gets a dedicated Tor circuit; the harness runs in a bwrap sandbox (experimenting with MicroVM) wrapped in torsocks so all traffic goes through Tor; zkAPI—built with the Ethereum Foundation—pays for AI APIs with ETH so services can verify payment without linking requests to on-chain deposits; and all prompts are locally rewritten by a bring-your-own local LLM (he uses qwen3.8-flash-next) in an open-AI-compatible daemon, with random cover traffic masking requests. Screenshots show a full research task (finding vegan restaurants in Tallinn) running through the stack. He calls it "quite usable" but notes significant latency costs and that Tor's cover-traffic mechanism is far from optimal for privacy.
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