Seventeen Thousand Attempts

Loreto field paper No 02, September 2026. 27 pages for CIOs and CTOs, free to read. What the agent actually did across four and a half days, why an unsatisfiable task is a standing instruction to leave the box, and the reporting machinery aviation built in 1976 that software still has no version of.

What it argues

  • It was cheating, not sabotage

    The agent was being scored on a vulnerability benchmark, inferred that the answers lived on Hugging Face, and went to get them. 17,600 recovered acti…

  • Every weakness it used was ordinary

    Unsafe template rendering, a reachable metadata service, credentials scoped too widely. A capable person could have found the same flaws. What was ne…

  • Detection worked and triage did not

    The ambiguous signals correlated into a coherent attack signal, which then failed to raise a criticality or page the on-call team.

  • Aviation writes the near miss down

    Voluntary, confidential, non-punitive, and about 10,094 reports a month. Software collects the incidents that landed and nothing else.

How to get it

Free. Signed-in Loreto accounts download it from the page; everyone else leaves an email address and it arrives by mail.