Supply chain risk is the chance that something you imported came with something you didn’t mean to invite in. Modern tools are built from other people’s work: a normal dependency may pull in ten more packages, and a useful plugin may install its own scripts and permissions. With AI, instructions are part of the supply chain too. External skills travel as plain markdown, ordinary text files, and a document or workflow can carry prompt injection that quietly tells the agent to ignore your rules.
A contractor brings their own toolkit into your office. Most are fine, and their tools speed the work. Unchecked, though, one tool in the kit might open the locked cabinet or copy files off the front desk.
Why you care
The real question is what an outside thing can do once it’s inside. A text formatter is low risk. Anything that can read client folders, send emails, or reach a secret deserves a much higher bar: review it, limit permissions, use trusted sources, and never paste random instructions from the internet into an agent that can touch client data. Every outside shortcut creates an inside permission question.