Reducing Attack Surface for AI Agents: Process-Scoped Credentials
Run env in your terminal. Everything you see there, your AI agent can see too. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, whatever you use. These tools run as processes on your machine with the same permissions as your shell. If you have AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY in your .zshrc, the agent has it. If you have a .env file with database credentials, the agent can read it. If you exported a Stripe API key three months ago and forgot about it, the agent still knows. This isn’t a bug. It’s how processes work on Unix.