The next time you ask an AI chatbot for the best dating app, a reliable roadside service or how to cancel an annoying subscription, the answer you get could have been planted by a marketer or a scammer, and using as few as 13 words buried in a Reddit comment.
That's the takeaway from a new preprint out of Cornell Tech, titled "Deep-Research Agents Can Be Poisoned via User-Generated Content," first reported by 404 Media. The researchers — Tingwei Zhang, Harold Triedman and Vitaly Shmatikov, built an attack they call WARP (Web Agent Retrieval Poisoning) and showed it works with unsettling reliability against the AI systems that increasingly stand between you and the open web.
