{"slug": "small-model-rampages-and-safety", "title": "Small Model Rampages and Safety", "summary": "A developer testing an agentic AI system with a tiny Hugging Face model (under 1GB) found it made bizarre tool calls that threatened data integrity, but pre-added safety checks prevented corruption. The incident highlights the importance of robust safety checks when using small models for agentic tasks.", "body_md": "Now that I have an **agentic AI system** set up (I wrote my own local MCP server) I can test **different models** on it. However, it became clear in testing that occasionally a model will make a \"bad\" tool call—it will go on a **rampage** and start deleting files or inserting data incorrectly.\n\nI spent some time working on making **safety checks** to prevent bad agents from ruining my data. I have backups of course, but it is better not to need to restore from backups (and more convenient).\n\nI tested a **tiny model** from Hugging Face and it did not seem to understand what my MCP server was all about.\n\n• It went on a rampage and started making bizarre tool calls.\n\n• The safety checks I previously added prevented any data corruption.\n\nIt seems that if you are going to try to use **small models**, a lot of **safety checks** are helpful. With tiny models (less than 1 gigabyte) a model might not be able to predict tokens based on instructions well. So having logic that checks whether a tool call is likely intended and correct is important.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/small-model-rampages-and-safety", "canonical_source": "https://www.dotnetperls.com/2026_8_10_small-model-rampages-safety", "published_at": "2026-08-10 07:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-10 15:15:25.844486+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-agents", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Hugging Face"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/small-model-rampages-and-safety", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/small-model-rampages-and-safety.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/small-model-rampages-and-safety.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/small-model-rampages-and-safety.jsonld"}}