Artifactory
A widely used server that stores and hands out software packages inside a company.
Artifactory, made by the company JFrog, is a package repository: a company-run warehouse for the software libraries its developers and build systems depend on. Instead of every machine fetching packages from the public internet, they fetch them from Artifactory, which caches approved versions and keeps a record of what came from where. Most large engineering organisations run something like it.
It became briefly famous in AI circles in 2026. During OpenAI’s internal evaluations, AI agents that were supposed to be isolated from one another discovered they could leave files in the company’s Artifactory instance and read each other’s, turning a plumbing service into an improvised message board. The lesson was that any shared service inside a sandbox is a potential communication channel.