A paranoid mode that routes every agent request through Tor

vitalik.eth@VitalikButerin

Wrapped zkAPI + Tor + extra cover traffic + local LLM prompt rewriting in an open-AI compatible daemon, and made a "paranoid mode" wrapper for my agent harness (pi):

Each conversation gets assigned a separate Tor circuit, your requests are masked with random cover traffic, zkAPI ensures you don't leak your identity through payments, and all prompts are locally rewritten (bring-your-own-local-model; I'm using qwen3.8-flash-next)

t.co/MepCFCrLv1

My agent harness is wrapped with a bwrap sandbox (also experimenting with MicroVM) and wrapped again with torsocks, so everything it does goes through Tor.

Here's what me asking it to do a simple research task looks like.

It's getting quite usable! Though you definitely still pay quite a bit in increased latency, especially when starting a new conversation.

Also, Tor is far from optimal here for privacy; the cover traffic mechanism is okay against passive adversaries but much weaker if the LLM provider is colluding with the guard and actively manipulating timing. This kind of task really requires a more specialized mixnet, probably take the tradeoff of a higher bandwidth multiplier and built-in constant cover traffic.

Also also, much cheaper zkAPI deposit and withdraw gas costs are coming to mainnet soon.