AI agent
A language model wired into a loop where it can take actions and see their results: it reasons, calls a tool, reads the output, and decides what to do next, repeating until the task is done. The security-relevant part is not the intelligence but the loop — an agent reads content nobody vetted, and acts on it, without a human in between each step. A coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex or Copilot CLI is the canonical case: it has the shell, the repository and the credentials.
See also agent host · tool call · confused deputy
Related terms
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Agent host
Agents & architecture
The program that runs the agent loop — the CLI, IDE extension or desktop app that assembles the context, sends it to the model, receives the tool calls…
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Tool call
Agents & architecture
The model's structured request to do something in the world — Bash("rm -rf …"), Read("/etc/passwd"), an HTTP fetch, a database query — emitted as a name…
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Confused deputy
Attack concepts
A classic security problem, dated 1988, that agents reproduce almost perfectly: a privileged component is tricked by a less-privileged party into misusing…
Agents & architecture
Where the attacks above actually land. The vocabulary here is worth precision, because the difference between "the model decided" and "the tool ran" is the difference between a risk and an incident.