Ultimately, the threat model here is: human has to approve a lot of commands, so gets tired and accidentally approves a command they shouldn’t have. We spent a significant amount of effort to build a richer permission system, allow configuration at multiple levels, use static analysis to detect dangerous and safe commands, monitor the model to detect and block prompt injection at the inference layer, etc. Some of these components we rewrote and red teamed dozens of times. Our conclusion was that despite all of this work, in practice the threat model is that human attention is limited and that that a different approach performs an order of magnitude better in practice.
With SOTA agents that’s a real bind, because they’re very likely to find those gaps. Whether they exploit them, close them, or leave them alone then becomes a prompting challenge yet again.
I don't think this means don't sandbox at all. You can prevent a lot of small and medium accidents by locking down or gating access to hidden files, ssh, sudo, etc.
But your sandbox can never be the whole story.
Speaking of really significant things being at risk, it's pretty infuriating that the web-chat Incognito mode can't write and test code locally, and neither the non-Incognito web-chat nor the local Claude Code client can be shielded from the knowledge of my email address and my geolocation. (Even the Incognito mode knows my geolocation.) This gives users no alternative but to put privacy-sensitive information at the disposal of Claude Code, which is far too unreliable to be entrusted with it. It's tempting to attribute this to Anthropic's corporate DNA valuing users' interests at a very low level, but conceivably it's just an oversight, and if I mention it here, it will be corrected in a month or two?
Maybe pick a better comparison if so?
You can make a script for the PreToolUse hook that can do that. I use a command gate script that parses input for doing that exactly, allowing/denying actions based on tool use + paths -- it started out as a hook to prevent claude from polluting my clojure projects/filesystem with python scripts in sneaky ways. Babashka works really well here
As it says:
> 5% allow any shell command outright, and another 43% have interpreter rules like Bash(python:*) or Bash(node:*) that are essentially equivalent in practice
Claude Code never should have prompted to always allow Bash(python:*) or Bash(node:*) — that’s clearly a bad idea, and Anthropic know that (given the references in the article!).
Of course, Bash(python a.py) still isn’t safe if you also allow Write(a.py), because you may as well allow Bash(python:*) at that point, and that’s often practically what people want (“I want to both make edits to the source and then run the test suite”). So maybe the whole permission system is broken to start with — and the actual answer is leaning more heavily on fine-grained sandboxing.
You also, as the article rightfully points out, run into permission fatigue and users blindly hitting allow.
I do still wish you could do more with hooks — outside of auto, I might want to allow a given command via a hook if Claude Code has read access to given file, but there’s no way to query if a given path allows/denies read/write.