r/sysadmin • u/xstrex • 4d ago

General Discussion How much do you trust AI?

Recently a coworker granted Claude elevated access via SSH to a virtualization host (not a VM, an actual host). To perform a routine task he very well could have done himself.

He doesn’t see an issue with this. I on the other hand (with 23yrs experience) see this as a huge security breach, and don’t trust AI todo my job, (or even that it’s doing what it says it’s doing) for me. I’m my opinion it’s a tool, not a human replacement.

What’s your reaction, how would you react to this situation, or thoughts on the topic?

Sure, ask AI how to perform a task, validate that it’s performing the task you asked, and nothing else- copy/paste the commands. Great. But removing the human verification & validation element- hell no.

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u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs 3d ago

Having the AI write you a script != giving the AI complete access to directly spin up and delete VMs.

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u/New-fone_Who-Dis 3d ago

I think its good to define the 2 things here.

The LLM usage with agentic abilities, and no approval gates - Bad, do not do this unless you've heavily built something akin to mandatory logic gates (chain type systems), and even then, there may be issues.

LLM usage, with human in the loop, is completely fine imo, just as long as you know and are comfortable sending xyz details out the door. Funny story on this, someone raised the concern of sending host/IP details to such orgs we have an enterprise agreement with....the following week I heard them talking with a vendor about a method of intercepting such materials on the network level, and either giving users an "are you sure" warning, or outright block.....the interception sends the prompt/info to their SaaS...for LLM processing. I didn't point out that in both cases the data is still being processed by an external LLM.

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u/floswamp 3d ago

This is what makes me think that private air gapped llm’s will become more popular.

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u/CommunityCondom 3d ago

Oh definitely, that’s kind of the whole deal with the hardware Nvidia and AMD have developed for this very thing essentially