Warp sends a terminal session to LLM without user consent

24 ykurtov 6 8/19/2025, 4:37:32 PM
Wonder how being used feels like? One way to experience that is to discover that your terminal silently started to send command outputs to LLMs.

Today, I got an LLM suggestion on how to fix a syntactic error after following an attempt to run a test.

So, I went on to Warp's Discord to ask what's going on, and sure enough, their "Friendly support bot" and I discovered that.

> Warp has introduced features like Prompt Suggestions and Next Command that use LLMs to provide contextual suggestions. These features are part of Warp's Active AI system, which proactively recommends fixes and next actions based on your terminal session, including errors, inputs, and outputs.

"Proactively" here also means without explicit user consent.

I did enjoy Warp, but that breach of trust is so enormous I'm removing it just now.

This tells volumes about ethics and what's important.

Ref: https://docs.warp.dev/agents/active-ai

Comments (6)

zenethian · 8m ago
I tried Warp once. Well, tried to install it. But when I ran it, instead of giving me a terminal, it showed me a login prompt. Perhaps I mistakenly downloaded a login prompt app instead of a terminal app? ;) Either way, I promptly uninstalled it as I needed a terminal app and not whatever that was.
drewbitt · 1h ago
Both Prompt Suggestions and Next Command are settings you can disable.
bigyabai · 1h ago
Warp has been a disaster product for years. Click into almost any of their HN threads and you'll find damning condemnations of their sneaky behavior: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
rstat1 · 6m ago
I uninstalled it after finding basic terminal functions broken.

I tend to append "clear &&" to commands I run frequently, to clear out output from a previous run. Every other terminal this works like you expect. In Warp, it doesn't. Turns they've hijacked the "clear" command for reasons I don't remember, such that it only works when you run it separately instead of as part a sequence. I only learned this when I went searching for a bug report on that found one that had been opened for a while where they essentially said they had no interest in making this sort of basic stuff work.

NitpickLawyer · 1h ago
I'm sorry but this should have been obvious once the "terminal" asks you to authenticate to a remote account. Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
rvz · 1h ago
very concerning.