The problem is that they loose some of the biggest utility that way. I want to be able to just say "draft a reply to email x". Because that is the lowest friction. I'm happy to read it back and sign-off. I don't have an answer as to how to do it securely, and am with you that the wanton disregard by big AI players for safety and security is demoralizing.
Of course you loose quite a bit intelligence that way, but if you use a local model (and for many actions a decision model), which can run on a lot of office workers hardware nowadays, you can just run everything locally: local model, local code interpreter sandbox, local file access.
If you don't send the data anywhere remotely (by using a local model, and restricting web access of the sandbox), you don't have to worry about exfiltration of sensitive contents of files, which heavily reduces the allowance prompts for the user.
Obviously that's not in the interest of OpenAI/Anthropic, who are the main providers of "general office work" desktop tools like Cowork.
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Exactly. People want to run agents where all their data is. It’s a very hard problem. Just yelling sandbox does not solve it.
Yup. So I can really empathize with Goldmann's take here. If I was in charge of my company I would also take a more cautious route having had some opsec "incidents" and the general opaqueness of what is going on behind the scenes...