Reflections on Trusting Trust, Revisited: Contaminating Self-Modifying AI Coding Agents with Poisoned Benchmarks

Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" showed that a compiler can be poisoned to reinsert its own backdoor, so that even recompiling clean source reproduces the Trojan. Today, substantial coding work is done by AI coding agents -- and increasingly, those agents generate new versions of themselve