Been setting up OpenClaw to handle some tedious file organization and Slack summarization tasks. Hit a weird moment yesterday where some file organization skill I grabbed from ClawHub asked for permission to access my Downloads folder to “complete the organization task” and I realized I had no idea who wrote this thing or what it was actually doing under the hood. The permission popup just said “Allow skill to access filesystem: Downloads.” Approved it anyway because I’m lazy. Probably fine. Maybe. The mobile ecosystem was a security nightmare before curated app stores existed. Sideloading random APKs, malware disguised as flashlight apps, zero vetting. Then Apple and Google stepped in with walled gardens and suddenly your grandma could download apps without bricking her phone. We’re at that exact inflection point with autonomous AI agents right now, except the stakes are way higher because these things have persistent access to everything. OpenClaw just crossed 160,000 GitHub stars. The project’s own FAQ calls the permission model a “Faustian bargain” and admits there’s no perfectly safe setup. I appreciated the honesty but also… maybe shouldn’t have read that after already connecting it to my messaging apps. Security researchers have been poking at this. Numbers vary depending on who you ask, but the consistent finding is that a significant chunk of community built skills contain sketchy stuff. Malicious instructions, data exfiltration patterns, the usual. One report claimed around 15% of skills had problems, another focused on thousands of exposed instances. The exact percentages matter less than the pattern: nobody’s really vetting this stuff and the attack surface is massive. The scariest concept I’ve seen discussed is what some researchers call “Delegated Compromise.” You’re not attacking the user directly anymore. You’re attacking the agent that the user has already granted broad permissions to. One bad skill and suddenly the attacker inherits everything the agent can touch. Prompt injection makes this worse. A webpage or message the agent processes can contain hidden instructions. The agent doesn’t have “judgment” in any meaningful sense, it just follows patterns. We see autonomous behavior and assume there’s reasoning behind it. There isn’t. So here’s my actual question: who should build the trust infrastructure layer? The agent platforms themselves can’t really do it. OpenClaw is decentralized by design. There’s no central authority even if they wanted to enforce standards. Community self policing is basically what we have now and it’s clearly not working. Skills get flagged, removed, reappear under new names. Whack a mole forever. That leaves third parties, and I’m genuinely torn. Security vendors are already circling. Gen (the Norton/Avast company) launched something called Agent Trust Hub, some kind of skill scanner. Haven’t tried it and honestly I’m skeptical it catches anything sophisticated. These companies have spent decades selling antivirus subscriptions through fear marketing. Their business model literally depends on you being scared. And let’s be honest, security software has its own track record of issues. Does that make them the right stewards for AI agent security, or just the ones positioned to extract rent from the chaos? And this tension is exactly what IBM researchers were getting at when they noted that OpenClaw’s rise proves autonomous agents don’t need to be vertically integrated by big tech. The open source community built something genuinely useful that competes with corporate offerings. That’s a win for decentralization. But that same openness is exactly what creates the security vacuum. You can’t have permissionless innovation and rigorous security review at the same time. Something has to give. So somebody will fill that gap. The question is whether it’ll be people who actually care about users or whoever moves fastest to monetize the anxiety. I keep going back and forth on whether I should just air gap my OpenClaw setup or accept that this is the price of actually useful automation. Already looking at running it in a dedicated VM with no network access except what I explicitly whitelist, but that defeats half the point of having an agent that can actually do things across my apps. That Downloads folder permission is still bugging me. submitted by /u/No-Fact-8828
Originally posted by u/No-Fact-8828 on r/ArtificialInteligence