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Double Agent AI— Staying Ahead of AI Security Risks, Avoiding Marketing Hype

· 5 min read
Chad Ratashak
Chad Ratashak
Owner, Midwest Frontier AI Consulting LLC

Hype Around Agents​

You may have heard a marketing pitch or seen an ad recently touting the advantages of “Agentic AI” or “AI Agents” working for you. These growing buzzwords in AI marketing come with significant security concerns. Agents take actions on behalf of the user, often with some pre-authorization to act without asking for further human permission. For example, an AI agent might be given a budget to plan a trip, might be authorized to schedule meetings, or might be authorized to push computer code updates to a GitHub repo.

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Midwest Frontier AI Consulting LLC does not sell any particular AI software, device, or tool. Instead, we want to equip our clients with the knowledge to be effective users of whichever generative AI tools they choose to use, or help our clients make an informed decision not to use GenAI tools.

Predictable Risks…​

…Were Predicted​

To be blunt: for most small and medium businesses with limited technology support, I would generally not recommend using agents at this time. It is better to find efficient uses of generative AI tools that still require human approval. In July 2025, researchers published Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents Against Prompt Injections. The research paper described a threat model very similar to an incident that later happened to the Node JS Package Manager (npm) in August 2025.

“4.10 Software Engineering Agent…a coding assistant with tool access to…install software packages, write and push commits, etc…third-party code imported into the assistant could hijack the assistant to perform unsafe actions such as…exfiltrating sensitive data through commits or other web requests.”

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Midwest Frontier AI Consulting LLC offers training and consultation to help you design workflows that take these threats into consideration. We stay on top of the latest AI security research to help navigate these challenges and push back on marketing-driven narratives. Then, you can decide by weighing the risks and benefits.

I was just telling some folks in the biomedical research industry about the risks of agents and prompt injection earlier this week. The following day, I read about how the npm software package was hacked to prompt inject large language model (LLM) coding agents to exfiltrate sensitive data via GitHub.

First Post

· 2 min read
Chad Ratashak
Chad Ratashak
Owner, Midwest Frontier AI Consulting LLC

Welcome to Midwest Frontier AI Consulting LLC. This consultancy will focus on helping small- and medium-sized law firms and other businesses based in the U.S. Midwest use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as large language models (LLMs). We will also help companies understand how GenAI will change their industry in ways they cannot control. For example, more customers may find them through ChatGPT or ask questions about their business using Gemini on Google Maps. They may also worry about competing GenAI substitutes to their core services and need to understand how to market themselves effectively or considering pivoting.