Developers flagged a freshly filed, reproducible issue that should make anyone running background agents pause: Claude Code's background Opus subagents intermittently stall on their first turn and, instead of producing useful work, emit system-prompt fragments — including text shaped like authorization data — as their only output. It's labeled a security issue, it has a reproduction, and it's open. That's enough to treat it as a real, if intermittent, class of failure.
Here's the mental model that matters: a subagent is not a trusted subprocess. It's an autonomous loop with access to a context window, a toolset, and — too often — the same credentials as its parent. When that loop stalls and dumps its prompt instead of its result, anything that was in context is now in output. Authorization-shaped text leaking is the canary: if the prompt carried a token, a session string, or an internal endpoint, that's what surfaces.
The fix is structural, not reactive. Three rules:
1. Scope credentials per subagent, not per session. A background agent that only needs to read a repo shouldn't hold deploy keys. Hand it the narrowest token that completes its task and revoke it when the task ends. If the tooling can't scope credentials, that's a gap to close before you scale subagents.
