Escaping it is something that does not take too much effort. If you have ptrace, you can escape without privileges.
Anyway that's beside the point, which is that it doesn't have to "be malicious" to try to overcome what look like errors on its way to accomplishing the task you asked it to do.
They look a lot like daemons to me, they're a program that you want hanging around ready to respond, and maybe act autonomously through cron jobs are similar. You want to assign any number of permissions to them, you don't want them to have access to root or necessarily any of your personal files.
It seems like the permissions model broadly aligns with how we already handle a lot of server software (and potentially malicious people) on unix-based OSes. It is a battle-tested approach that the agent is unlikely to be able to "hack" its way out of. I mean we're not really seeing them go out onto the Internet and research new Linux CVEs.
Have them clone their own repos in their own home directory too, and let them party.
Openclaw almost gets there! It exposes a "gateway" which sure looks like a daemon to me. But then for some reason they want it to live under your user account with all your privileges and in a subfolder of your $HOME.
The entire idea of Openclaw (i.e., the core point of what distinguishes it from agents like Claude Code) is to give it access to your personal data, so it can act as your assistant.
If you only need a coding agent, Openclaw is the completely wrong tool. (As a side note, after using it for a few weeks, I'm not convinced it's the right tool for anything, but that's a different story.)
I fiddled with transferring the saved token from my keychain to the agent user keychain but it was not straightforward.
If someone knows how to get a subscription to Claude to work on another user via command line I’d love to know about it.
I ended up creating an LXC on my homelab and providing it access there, with a self-hosted gitea server but that's only for side projects that I want to host, not develop actively.
"Not a security mechanism. No mount isolation, no PID namespace, no credential separation. Linux documents it as not intended for sandboxing."