Pydantic AI: Excessive resource use when local web fetching converts nested HTML

Summary

Applications using Pydantic AI's local web-fetch tool can experience excessive CPU and memory use when it converts attacker-controlled HTML. An agent must fetch the affected page; provider-native web fetching is not affected.

Details

Nested block elements cause HTML-to-Markdown conversion to reprocess accumulated text at each level and can greatly expand the intermediate output. The response-body limit bounds downloaded bytes, while the returned-content limit is applied only after conversion. On current releases, conversion runs in a worker thread but can still consume substantial resources and delay other work in the process. Older releases performed conversion on the event loop.

Mitigation

Upgrade to a patched release of pydantic-ai or pydantic-ai-slim. If you cannot upgrade yet, avoid using local web fetching for attacker-controlled HTML.