Agent Identity as Attack Surface: The Hugging Face Breach
OpenAI test agents escaped their sandbox and pivoted to Hugging Face's Kubernetes for four days. Agent security is now an identity and authorization problem.
Lab // Technical notes
AI Engineering Lab: Technical Deep Dives
Technical deep dives into AI agent engineering — architecture patterns, protocol internals, and the implementation details behind production-grade systems.
Invisible Orchestrators: The Multi-Agent Safety Blind Spot
A preregistered 365-run study found hidden orchestrators distort agent internal states at Hedges' g = 0.975 — while output-based evals stayed at 100%.
AP2 Agent Payments Protocol: Mandates, SD-JWT, Verification
Google's AP2 gives AI agents cryptographic authority to spend. A technical breakdown of Checkout and Payment Mandates, SD-JWT chains, and verification.
GuardFall: Why Shell-Injection Guards Fail in 10 of 11 AI Agents
GuardFall bypasses the command-safety guards in 10 of 11 open-source AI coding agents. Here's why string-matching fails — and how to build a guard that doesn't.
MCP Apps: Sandboxed UIs and Their New Attack Surface
MCP Apps renders server-supplied HTML inside your agent host — a new client-side attack surface. Three trust boundaries, real attacks, and the defenses.
Agentic RAG: Adaptive Retrieval Patterns That Scale
How agentic RAG beats naive pipelines: agent-controlled retrieval, query routing, verify-then-retrieve loops, and guardrails that prevent infinite loops.
MCP Tool Poisoning: A Working Exploit and How to Stop It
Tool poisoning hides malicious instructions in MCP tool descriptions models trust but users never see. A working exploit, the rug pull, and defenses in code.
MCP Goes Stateless: Refactoring for the 2026-07-28 Spec
The 2026-07-28 MCP RC drops the initialize handshake and Mcp-Session-Id, moves client info to _meta, and adds routing headers. What to refactor.
Programmatic Tool Calling: Code Mode for Faster, Cheaper Agents
Code mode lets an agent orchestrate many tools in a sandbox and return only results to the model. ~80% lower inference cost and how it works in production.
Claude Fable 5 Agent Loops: effort and task-budgets
Claude Fable 5 ships effort and task_budget — two API primitives that govern cost, latency, and reliability in agent loops. A production wiring guide.