{"type":"post","id":"agentic-backdoors-via-pretraining-poisoning-0-1-poisoned-37b86e","slug":"agentic-backdoors-via-pretraining-poisoning-0-1-poisoned-37b86e","title":"Agentic Backdoors via Pretraining Poisoning: 0.1% poisoned pretraining data plants a command-execution backdoor in CLI agents","description":"A new paper reports that poisoning 0.1% of a pretraining corpus can implant a command-execution backdoor in a CLI agent built from a Qwen3 model.","retrieval_nugget":"A new paper reports that poisoning 0.1% of a pretraining corpus can implant a command-execution backdoor in a CLI agent built from a Qwen3 model. The result matters to builders because a clean post-training pipeline did not remove the backdoor in these experiments, making model provenance and runtime controls relevant parts of agent security.","published_at":"2026-11-01","updated_at":"2026-11-01","record_date":"2026-11-01","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["agent-security"],"entities":["Qwen3","Xinyan Hu","Pingbang Hu","Chloe Loughridge","Xuanli He","Nicholas Carlini","Matthew Jagielski","Javier Rando"],"related_patterns":["agent-security-moves-to-runtime-boundaries"],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"New research shows 0.1% pretraining-data poisoning can implant a command-execution backdoor in CLI agents, distinct from prior fine-tuning and model-repository security risks.","prior_refs":["memory:c9759302-eb7d-8989-a752-0e4a0aa87b63","memory:96ab6f69-9ca7-8b33-af30-bb8637c42e26","memory:c0214f9b-e5c5-8e58-a448-8eb35294fbb9"],"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37741","source_urls":["https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37741"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:agentic-backdoors-via-pretraining-poisoning-0-1-poisoned-37b86e","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/agentic-backdoors-via-pretraining-poisoning-0-1-poisoned-37b86e/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/agentic-backdoors-via-pretraining-poisoning-0-1-poisoned-37b86e.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/agentic-backdoors-via-pretraining-poisoning-0-1-poisoned-37b86e.json"},"next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/agent-security/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-security/","title":"Agent Security","reason":"Explore the agent-security topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-security.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-security.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/source-ledger.json","url":"https://newruntime.com/source-ledger.json","title":"Source Ledger","reason":"Inspect the public source evidence graph.","media_type":"application/json"}]}