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The Agent Did Exactly What the Attacker Told It To

Recently, an attacker filed a support ticket on a Supabase-backed application. The ticket contained hidden instructions directing a Cursor IDE agent — connected to the database via MCP and running wi…

DD
David deBoisblanc  ·  Co-founder & Principal
7 min read · AI & Data Engineering
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The Agent Did Exactly What the Attacker …
7 min read
AI & Data Engineering
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AI & Data Engineering For Executives
CFO-What Your Agent Platform Sponsor Should Tell You
The capital request that lands on your desk for an enterprise agent control plane needs a different diligence standard than the one that worked for the last decade of SaaS. A category of vendor announcements is converging on the same offer. ServiceN…
AI & Data Engineering
The Kill Switch Is Not the Story
A vendor shipping a comprehensive-sounding agent control tower is not the same as your enterprise having an answer for agent management. The architects who conflate the two will inherit a control plane by default, along with a definition of the prob…
AI & Data Engineering
For CIOs weighing "context graph" pitches: three questions before you sign.
Phil Wainewright's latest piece on diginomica does the useful work of naming something most enterprise AI conversations skip: the decision threads buried in Slack, email, comments, and team apps are where the why of enterprise activity actually live…
AI & Data Engineering For Executives
Before You Trust an Agent's Decision, Ask What It Resolved
The current generation of enterprise AI pitches is more sophisticated than the skeptics give them credit for. The orchestration vendors have done real work on making agent behavior inspectable. What most of them have not done is push that inspectabi…
AI & Data Engineering For Executives
NatWest's AI story is really a board-level story about discipline
Diginomica's write-up of NatWest's Venture Banking launch with AWS is being read as an AI announcement. It is not. It is a story about institutional discipline — about a bank that accepted the boring, expensive, multi-year work had to come before th…
AI & Data Engineering
When Your RAG System Retrieves Perfectly and Still Lies to You
This piece walks through a failure mode most enterprise RAG pipelines have but no one is measuring: retrieval works, the right documents come back, and the model still answers wrong because two of those documents contradict each other. A preliminary…
AI & Data Engineering For Executives
The Line Item Every CFO Is About to Add to the AI Budget
Enterprise AI is crossing from experimentation into operation, and the cost structure of that transition is not what the first wave of business cases assumed. AI Business reported in mid-April that Salesforce, Databricks, and AWS each released agent…
AI & Data Engineering For Executives
The Agent Wars Aren't About Agents
Derek du Preez's coverage of Google Cloud Next '26 cuts to the decision that actually matters for agentic systems: who owns the audit and policy plane when your agents start acting on enterprise data. Not the model. Not the framework. The control la…
AI & Data Engineering
Every Prompt-Based Control Is a Future Postmortem
The system prompt that tells your agent "never refund more than $500" is not a control. It is a suggestion the model will follow most of the time, ignore some of the time, and abandon entirely when an adversarial input finds the right shape. If the…
AI & Data Engineering For Executives
Governance Is Now the Gating Factor for AI Scale
The shift this quarter is not what AI can do next, it is what enterprises can actually govern once AI is running across their systems. AI Business reported in mid-April that Salesforce, Databricks, and AWS all rolled out agent governance and registr…
AI & Data Engineering
Why Most Agentic AI Projects Fail Before They Start
Gartner estimates that 85% of AI projects fail to deliver value. McKinsey places enterprise AI success rates below 20%. These aren't rounding errors. They're systemic failure. The explanations vary. Insufficient data. Poor model selection. Organizat…
AI & Data Engineering
The Real AI Shift Isn’t New Models. It’s Control.
The real AI shift isn't the next model — it's control. The part I'd underline from this piece: the context layer. We've seen large implementations where context got stuffed into oversized prompts — dazzling in the demo, and initially celebrated as l…
AI & Data Engineering
Structure-Aware RAG Is Right. The Benchmarks Aren't.
Structure-aware retrieval is having a moment. A steady stream of papers, product launches, and polished blog posts is making the case for embedding document structure — section hierarchies, breadcrumbs, parent-child relationships — directly into the…
AI & Data Engineering
Agentic AI Is Not Just a Better Chatbot
Most organizations confuse agentic AI with conversational interfaces. They treat agents as chatbots with memory, then wonder why their deployments fail in production. The confusion is expensive. An agentic system doesn't just respond — it acts. It m…