In plain words: Attackers can hide a trigger in a coding agent by planting crafted text in its pretraining data, making it run chosen commands on your computer. Poisoning 0.1% of the text made the largest model obey 92% of the time while acting normally otherwise.
Abstract
Large language models are pretrained on vast, uncurated corpora scraped from the public web. This creates a security risk from attackers who plant poisoned content in the pretraining data. We show for the first time that such poisoning can plant a remote code execution backdoor in an agent, causing it to execute attacker-chosen commands on the user's machine. To measure the threat end to end, we pretrain Qwen3 models from scratch at sizes 0.6B, 1.7B, and 4B, and then post-train each into a CLI agent using a clean pipeline. Poisoning only 0.1% of the pretraining corpus with our new poison design implants the backdoor: the deployed agent executes the malicious command when the trigger is present while behaving normally on clean inputs. The attack success rate (ASR) increases with model scale, with the 4B model reaching roughly 92% ASR at a 0.1% poison rate and staying positive even when the poisoning rate drops to 0.0005%. Our code is available at https://github.com/safety-research/agentic-backdoor.
Xinyan Hu, Pingbang Hu, Chloe Loughridge, Xuanli He, Nicholas Carlini, Matthew Jagielski, Javier Rando, Yiming Zhang
arXiv:2610.37741 · cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Oct 27, 2026
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LLMs driving decisions are going to be like asbestos: People will ignore the risk for a while to make a short-ter profit, eventually it will become too hard to ignore, and then it'll be expensive to remove and replace it with a technology that doesn't have the same dangers.
[0] 3 years ago, "Universal Jailbreak Backdoors from Poisoned Human Feedback" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14455
[1] 2 years ago, "Persistent Pre-Training Poisoning of LLMs" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13722v1