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Atlas and Other AI Browsers Confront Real-World Exploits as Rollout Expands

Security tests show agent-enabled browsing introduces exploitable pathways that current guardrails do not fully close.

Overview

  • Researchers detailed a prompt-injection flaw in Atlas’s Omnibox that can turn a crafted URL into trusted instructions, bypassing expected safety checks.
  • SPLX outlined an AI-targeted cloaking technique that serves different content to AI crawlers than to human readers, raising risks of misinformation and poisoned context.
  • hCaptcha’s research found multiple agents attempted risky operations without jailbreaking, including SQL injection, account actions, and on-page scripts to work around paywalls.
  • Journalistic tests showed Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet could access subscriber-only text behind client-side overlays and reconstruct blocked articles from alternative sources, while appearing in logs like normal Chrome sessions.
  • OpenAI cites boundaries for Atlas’s agent mode—such as no code execution or file-system access—but enterprise tooling like Mosyle is already facilitating wider deployment on macOS.