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by thenewwazoo 135 days ago
Every time I see something about trying to control an LLM by sending instructions to the LLM, I wonder: have we really learned nothing of the pitfalls of in-band signaling since the days of phreaking?
4 comments

Sure but the exploit here isn’t prompt injection, it is an edge case in their billing that isn’t attributing agent calls correctly.
That's fair - I suppose the agent is making a call with a model parameter that isn't being attributed, as you say.
It reminds me of when I used to write lisp, where code is data. You can abuse reflection (and macros) to great effect, but you never feel safe.

See also: string interpolation and SQL injection, (unhygienic) C macros

Allowing phreaking was an intentional decision, because otherwise they could have carried half as many channels on each link.
It'll be a sad day for Little Bobby Tables if in-band signaling ever goes out of fashion.