alt Hacker NewsI feel like this would build a false sense of security.
Authentication and access controls must be able to withstand an agent with full shell access. And auditing must be on the server side to provide a full picture of all activity from all clients, whether human or agent.
We must treat agents as clever humans and secure and audit data access accordingly. The era of thinking we can handle agent access to sensitive information differently from human access has passed.
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Without tools LLMs can do nothing more than emit text. You are probably assuming a harness is provided to the LLM with shell access but that is absolutely not necessary for LLM usage depending on the use case. For interesting stuff, you do want to provide some tools, but nothing with the power of a terminal if you are worried about security. A MCP server is perfect to securely provide the LLM with some controlled power exactly because it can do nothing at all other than call tools that go through the MCP server and can therefore be scrutinized, audited and ensure credentials are not visible to the LLM.
My point about MCPs here is that they provide a way to make those secrets and API keys deterministically inaccessible to the agents - even agents that's have a shell execution environment.
That's the opposite of a false sense of security.