Home Assistant is great, but it comes with a steep learning curve. It’s understandable why the idea of letting an AI do everything for you is appealing, but it could have serious consequences.
The wild west of system-level access
Letting AI rewrite your smart home is not the best idea
Vibe coding is a double-edged sword. It lowers the barrier of entry for people who want to create their own projects and helps coders get things done more quickly. On the flip side, people are able to create software without any robust security measures in place.
Recently, there’s been a spate of Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools popping up that allow you to connect your Home Assistant instance to an AI chatbot. These tools let the AI read data from your entire setup, so that it can spot errors that need fixing, ghost entities that need removing, or flaws in your automations.
Many of these tools also allow the AI not only to read data, but also to write it. This means you can ask the AI to create an automation using natural language to describe what you want to happen, and the tool will create the automation for you in Home Assistant.
It sounds like the perfect way to take your Home Assistant setup to the next level, and according to forum posts, many people are using it to supercharge their smart homes. There are significant problems, however.
The dangers of unfettered access
Why giving AI write access is a bad idea
Giving an AI full read and write access to your Home Assistant server is a major shift from local control to agentic control. You’re no longer the person making the decisions about what changes in your smart home, your AI chatbot is.
If you’ve ever used an AI for any length of time, you know that sometimes they make mistakes. Other times, they just simply make things up. The problem is that you may not be aware of the mistakes that an AI is making when it rewrites your entire Home Assistant setup until it’s too late.
There are also significant security concerns. If an AI has full access to Home Assistant, that could include sensitive information, such as the secrets.yaml file that contains all your API keys, passwords, alarm codes, and more. In order for a cloud-based AI to process this information, it has to be sent to third-party servers, where that information is no longer in your control.
Your Home Assistant data also contains a lot of information about you, such as location data, presence data, power usage, and more. Using this information, an AI could determine when you’re away from home, when your home is unlocked, your habits, and more. All of this information is leaving your home and being processed in the cloud.
The worst part is that many people are using potentially vibe-coded MCP tools that may not be secure at all. At best, you’re risking your Home Assistant setup failing due to an error or hallucination by the chatbot. At worst, you’re one prompt injection away from someone gaining access to your entire smart home.
Using AI without the risk
There’s no need to hand over the keys
That’s not to say that AI can’t be a really useful tool that can help you to achieve even more with Home Assistant. The problem isn’t necessarily using AI; it’s giving AI complete access to everything on your Home Assistant server and letting it rewrite it all at will.
There’s no problem with asking an AI chatbot to write an automation for you, which you can then paste into Home Assistant and update with the appropriate entities. You can see the steps in the Home Assistant automation editor and determine whether it’s going to do anything it shouldn’t. You can also copy and paste an automation, script, or template into a chatbot once you’ve removed anything sensitive and ask it how to improve it.
There’s an official Home Assistant MCP that also allows you to connect an AI to Home Assistant in a more secure way. It grants access only to devices that you’ve exposed to Assist. You can use it to query the state of your smart home or to turn on lights by asking a chatbot, but it doesn’t have the ability to rewrite your configuration or create automations. This is much more limited than the unofficial MCP tools, but also far more secure.
Home Assistant is built on privacy
Consider a local LLM
The problem with these MCP tools is that while they can potentially help you to improve your Home Assistant automations and configuration, they come at the cost of exposing your information to a third-party service. This goes against one of the central pillars of what Home Assistant stands for.
Home Assistant was built with privacy in mind. The founders believed that you shouldn’t need to use third-party cloud services in order to control the devices in your own home. Home Assistant was designed with a focus on local control, so that your personal data stays within your home.
If you really want to use AI to make changes to your Home Assistant setup, there is a way to do so and maintain privacy. You can use a local LLM that runs on your computer, provided you have reasonable hardware, and then none of the sensitive information from your smart home needs to be shared outside your local network. This won’t solve the problems of AI hallucinations and other errors, but it does at least keep things private.
- Dimensions (exterior)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 Ounces
Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.
You’re not saving time if you lose everything
A lot of people seem to be using these MCP tools to write automations, tidy up their Home Assistant configurations, or create dashboards. The trouble is that while these tools can save you time, they also put you at risk of breaking your setup or exposing private information. Your beautiful dashboard isn’t much use if your chatbot has deleted all your files.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
