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&P) 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&P 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&P practices. We found these actions are driven by various inhibitors, primarily a lack of formal training on S&P related skills, accessible security tools and actionable guidance from platforms. Our work contributed the first exploration of independent AI agent developers' S&P understanding, outlining opportunities for tailored security tooling.

翻译：AI Agent的普及使独立开发者（指个人或小团队自发启动项目，而非基于客户合同的开发者）能够构建复杂的自主系统，但也带来了超越传统企业架构的新型安全与隐私挑战。我们对28名中国开发者进行了访谈研究，这些开发者广泛使用全球大语言模型服务，为理解该群体提供了宝贵视角。我们探究了他们在AI Agent产品开发中面临的安全与隐私认知、实践与挑战。研究发现，独立开发者经常从用户角度思考与行动：他们关注面向用户的危害内容等安全风险，但对安全漏洞的认知度较低。因此，开发者几乎完全依赖临时性的人工防护措施和非正式沟通，缺乏正式的安全与隐私实践工具或流程。我们进一步发现，这些行为受多种抑制因素驱动，主要源于缺乏安全与隐私相关技能的正式培训、可获取的安全工具以及平台提供的可操作指南。本研究首次探索了独立AI Agent开发者的安全与隐私认知，并为定制化安全工具的开发指明了方向。