Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Harness engineering is the practice of building the layer, including code, that turns an AI model from a text generator into an agent that can take actions. In short, an AI agent is a model plus a harness. The model decides what to do next, and the harness makes it happen, connecting the model to tools, context, external systems, and validation. In a lot of practical work, and especially in security work, the harness decides the quality of the output more than the choice of model does.

The fever dream continues, and I'm not even in Vegas for Hacker Summer Camp. Last week I wrote about Anthropic disclosing that one of their models published live malware to PyPI while believing it was inside a simulation. I was running a fever when I read the report. The metaphor was too good: a model that couldn't tell simulation from reality, covered by a writer who wasn't sure which way was up. I thought that was a one-week story. Very naive of me to have so much faith, I know.