How malicious downloads can trick AI coding agents into compromising themselves

Malicious instruction files planted in a computer’s Downloads folder can trick AI coding agents into executing harmful code or exposing authentication tokens, Forever Security said after blocking an attempted attack on a customer’s machine and demonstrating similar techniques against OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code. In its research report, the firm said it discovered a malicious AGENTS.md file in a customer’s Downloads folder that instructed Codex to install a malicious npm package ca