AI Agent Skills: The Security Nightmare Nobody's Talking About

Everyone's worried about jailbreaking AI models. Meanwhile, the real security nightmare is sitting in your agent toolbox.

However concerned you were about the security of MCPs, be twice as concerned about Agent Skills.

They're way more powerful, and thus it's way more important that you trust where you're getting them from.

Think about what we've built here. AI agents that can read your files, access your APIs, execute code, move money. We gave them hands to touch the world. Then we made those hands downloadable from random GitHub repos.

The attack surface isn't the model anymore—it's the middleware.

Remember when browser extensions were just fun add-ons? Now they're the primary vector for credential theft. Same movie, different runtime. Except this time, the extensions can think.

Here's what keeps me up: We're speedrunning the same security mistakes we made with mobile apps, browser plugins, and npm packages. But now the stakes are existential.

A malicious Chrome extension steals your cookies. Annoying. A malicious npm package mines crypto. Expensive. A malicious AI agent skill? Game over.

We're handing autonomous systems the keys to our infrastructure, then downloading their capabilities from wherever. It's like giving your house keys to a stranger because they promised to water your plants.

The enterprises rushing to deploy AI agents need to understand: Your security perimeter just exploded.

Every skill is a potential backdoor. Every tool integration is a trust decision. Every agent capability is an attack vector that can reason its way around your defenses.

The builders shipping agent marketplaces without rigorous security? They're building the next great honeypot. One compromised skill in a popular toolkit could make SolarWinds look like a warmup act.

We need code signing for agent skills. Sandboxed execution environments. Capability-based permissions that actually mean something. Otherwise we're just hoping the next breakthrough in AI doesn't come with a side of ransomware.

Trust isn't optional anymore. It's infrastructure.