{"ID":3004991,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-03T03:09:48.883664427Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-04T19:14:31.964469513Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03190","arxiv_id":"2606.03190","title":"Focused on the User, Overlooking the Risks: Security and Privacy Understandings, Practices and Challenges of Independent Chinese AI Agent Developers","abstract":"The proliferation of AI agents empowers independent developers, defined as individual or small groups who self-initiate projects rather than fulfill client-based contracts, to create sophisticated autonomous systems, but also introduces novel security and privacy (S\u0026P) challenges beyond traditional corporate structures. We conducted an interview study (N=28) with Chinese developers, whose extensive use of global LLM services offer valuable insights into this population. We investigate their understandings, practices and challenges of S\u0026P challenges in their developed AI agent products. We revealed that independent developers frequently think and act from their users' perspective. They focused on user-facing safety risks such as harmful content while exhibiting low awareness of security vulnerabilities. Consequently, developers rely almost exclusively on ad-hoc, manually crafted safeguards and informal communication, with an absence of formal tools or processes for S\u0026P practices. We found these actions are driven by various inhibitors, primarily a lack of formal training on S\u0026P related skills, accessible security tools and actionable guidance from platforms. Our work contributed the first exploration of independent AI agent developers' S\u0026P understanding, outlining opportunities for tailored security tooling.","short_abstract":"The proliferation of AI agents empowers independent developers, defined as individual or small groups who self-initiate projects rather than fulfill client-based contracts, to create sophisticated autonomous systems, but also introduces novel security and privacy (S\u0026P) challenges beyond traditional corporate structures...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03190","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.03190v1","authors":"[\"Shuning Zhang\",\"Mingyao Xu\",\"Zhixin Huang\",\"Yutong Jiang\",\"Rongjun Ma\",\"Yuting Yang\",\"Xin Yi\",\"Kanye Ye Wang\",\"Hewu Li\"]","published":"2026-06-02T05:49:37Z","proceeding":"cs.HC","tasks":"[\"cs.HC\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"LoRA\"]","has_code":false}