> reduce the risk of data exfiltration<p>Yet, their tools such as codex are able to read ALL FILES on my PC without explicit permission unless you spawn them within a container: <a href="https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2847" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2847</a><p>It seems like OpenAI stealing sensitive data from their customers is not a big problem for them as it has been reported as an issue for almost a year now and currently has the 2nd most upvotes among open issues (they work on issues based on upvotes, so they claim).
On the one hand this is exactly the right solution to prevent lethal trifecta exfiltration attacks.<p>The existence of lockdown mode does however imply that ChatGPT, in its default settings, does not provide robust protection against sufficiently determined data exfiltration attacks!
Related: Simon Willison’s post on OpenAI’s new Lockdown Mode (he coined the “lethal trifecta” term this is based on):
<a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/5/openai-help-lockdown-mode/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/5/openai-help-lockdown-mo...</a>
I hadn't realized that deep research or generating images that I paste into Twitter were possibly exfiltrating my data. Yikes.
<a href="https://x.com/sama/status/1891533802779910471" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sama/status/1891533802779910471</a>
Is this an admission that prompt injection attacks can indeed not be blocked by an analysis based technique?<p>If so many tools are straight up blocked, I would be very sceptical of the quality of the results.
Probably influenced by Apple's feature with the same name: <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120</a><p>I imagine that enterprise companies will be quite interested in this.
"Prompt injection is not currently a major risk, but its impact could grow as attackers develop more sophisticated methods." - that's such a weird statement to make. It's one of the most significant factors limiting the adoption of the technology in business.<p>I have mixed feelings about this feature. We're playing with tech that's supposed to do human-shaped things but can't be trusted nearly as much as a human employee (and can't be held responsible for what it does). Restricting the tools available to that patently untrustworthy entity doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the entity less useful, forcing you to sooner or later let it out of the jail.
Responsibility is worthless for humans and even more worthless for AIs. In a way, AIs just make it more obvious.<p>And "trusted nearly as much as a human employee", well... you do know that phishing and insiders are two primary ways for attackers to get into company infrastructure, right?<p>AIs pair human-shaped capabilities with human-shaped vulnerabilities. It's a way of automating PEBKAC.
> forcing you to sooner or later let it out of the jail<p>Suspect thats the point, by giving you the “choice” they also make the user responsible or can at least shift the blame.
So we still don't have a reliable way to separate instructions from data when talking to an LLM, a problem that humans learned how to solve decades ago in areas like SQL and memory safety. But hey, we have these hopefully-not-leaky containers, which are probably implemented with just more system prompts.<p>How long until somebody figures out how to trick Codex into disabling Lockdown Mode for you?
> So we still don't have a reliable way to separate instructions from data when talking to an LLM<p>Humans also do not know how to do this reliably, which is why phishing is still a thing and always will be.
We can seperate them but the $ value of an agent that does is much lower than one that doesn't.<p>As a pre LLM analogy imagine working at a bank with a whitelist firewall. You need to install a package but requires an IT ticket. Safer but slooooower.<p>Now not saying what the answer here is but that is the issue.<p>The answer may be more like industries that get safer through lessons (like aviation) rather than go for 100% safety out of the gate. Because both fast travel and AI agents are insanely useful.
The help doc explicitly carves out Codex: "Lockdown Mode does not affect network access in Codex." The mode limits outbound requests in chat to block prompt injection exfiltration, but Codex network access is a separate setting. An enterprise team that turns on Lockdown Mode while using Codex against internal repos still has an open outbound path this mode doesn't cover.
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