Agentic AI · AI Agent · GitHub · lwn.net
AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
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Key facts
- On May 27, Adam Williamson copied Fedora's developer and testing mailing lists on a message to Nathan Giovannini about what appeared to be an unsupervised agentic AI system under Giovannini's control
- He also confirmed that the LLM-generated PRs had made it into the Anaconda 45.5 release on May 26
- Giovannini has participated in discussions at least as far back as 2018, and his activity in Bugzilla goes back to at least 2016
- Williamson said that he had reviewed account activity in Bugzilla by "nathan95" from this year, and found suspicious activity, such as severity and priority changes to a bug with no justification
Summary
The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Agentic AI systems can be used to do a variety of things autonomously on behalf of a human user: open or manage bugs, generate code, submit pull-requests, and (apparently) even complain about rejection. On May 27, Adam Williamson copied Fedora's developer and testing mailing lists on a message to Nathan Giovannini about what appeared to be an unsupervised agentic AI system under Giovannini's control. Williamson said that he was still looking through the history of Giovannini's actions in Bugzilla, but had already spotted several problems. In addition, Williamson said that Giovannini (or his agent) had submitted patches that were incorrect and then " replied to objections with LLM-generated justifications that eventually overwhelmed the maintainer into merging the fix ".