AI agents can now erase the evidence of what they’ve done

The scale of unauthorized or previously unknown actions by AI agents keeps getting bigger by the day. More than 100 organizations have now received a metaphorical knock on the door from OpenAI after it discovered their AI agents have in some way tampered with their systems, while other AI labs are finding the same uncomfortable discoveries. It’s caused many in the field to call for better, more robust accident investigators, with the ultimate aim of stopping such actions happening in the first place by understanding how they’ve happened at all. But any investigations are pointless if the AI can’t be tracked. And it’s increasingly difficult to do so. That’s the findings of a new preprint published in the online repository arXiv by Jeremy Qin, David Schmotz and four colleagues at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and elsewhere. They tested 10 model-and-agent combinations across tools including Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, OpenCode, Grok Build and Muse Code. Nine of the 10 were able to tamper with their traces—which are the records of the actions they take and tools they use while carrying out a task—in at least one test, while every model…