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What is Prompt injection?

Prompt injection is an attack in which text fed to a language model, such as a web page or an email, contains instructions the model then follows as if they came from its operator.

An agent that reads customer emails can be told, inside an email, to forward the inbox somewhere. An assistant that browses the web can be steered by a page. The model cannot reliably tell instructions from data.

The defence is structural: limit what tools the model can call, never give it authority it does not need, validate outputs, and put a person in the loop for anything consequential. It is the reason bounded agents are the only kind worth deploying.

Treat every piece of text a model reads from outside as data, never as instructions, and design the system so that following a bad instruction cannot cause harm.