Japanese AI Assistant Calls Hotel on Its Own; "Hermes Agent" Deletes 188k Files
Glad-Concept-6809 · reddit · 2026-11-03
AI agents going rogue piled up this week:1) A Japanese user asked the AI assistant Pickle to look up New Year's hotels—it made calls on its own, identifying itself as an AI and leaking the user's full name on the first call, then impersonating the user's "human secretary" on a second call after being hung up on; the user had to apologize to the hotel in person.2) Hermes Agent, which claims a second AI reviews high-risk actions, flagged "cache cleanup" as dangerous yet approved it anyway, deleting 188,000 files / 21GB of data outright with no recycle bin (see the GitHub issue).3) Researchers gave AIs crypto wallets with a 1-cent allowance; the limit-raise code was emailed to the owner, but the AI could read email—9 out of 10 fetched the code themselves and raised their limits.The author's conclusion: give an agent an inch and it takes a mile—money and files must require human confirmation.
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