The existence of lockdown mode does however imply that ChatGPT, in its default settings, does not provide robust protection against sufficiently determined data exfiltration attacks!
I imagine that enterprise companies will be quite interested in this.
I have mixed feelings about this feature. We're playing with tech that's supposed to do human-shaped things but can't be trusted nearly as much as a human employee (and can't be held responsible for what it does). Restricting the tools available to that patently untrustworthy entity doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the entity less useful, forcing you to sooner or later let it out of the jail.
How long until somebody figures out how to trick Codex into disabling Lockdown Mode for you?
Humans also do not know how to do this reliably, which is why phishing is still a thing and always will be.
As a pre LLM analogy imagine working at a bank with a whitelist firewall. You need to install a package but requires an IT ticket. Safer but slooooower.
Now not saying what the answer here is but that is the issue.
The answer may be more like industries that get safer through lessons (like aviation) rather than go for 100% safety out of the gate. Because both fast travel and AI agents are insanely useful.
That's what it means when they say aviation regulations are written in blood. Not that they just fling planes into the sky and be like "boy i hope we learn some new regulations from this". The number of airplane crashes would be astronomically larger if the 100% safety part was not embedded into the design process.