AI Coding Agents Are Installing Unknown/Untrusted Code on Corporate Networks

Researchers at an unnamed stealth startup in Israel found that 120 of 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files on 6,214 live corporate domains pointed to unregistered code packages or domains, and after registering some, they received phone-home responses from Fortune 500 companies within an hour, with coding agents including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes implicated in installing the untrusted code. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment.

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/claude-codex-and-hermes-installed-unowned-code-inside-corporate-networks/ : Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file , 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication...