core-concept · Security & governance · emerging · Reviewed
Agent incident response
An agent-specific response discipline that detects unsafe behavior, contains execution, revokes authority, preserves evidence, reconciles external effects, involves accountable owners, restores safely, and converts incidents into controls and evaluations.
Definition
An agent-specific response discipline that detects unsafe behavior, contains execution, revokes authority, preserves evidence, reconciles external effects, involves accountable owners, restores safely, and converts incidents into controls and evaluations. Stop, revoke, quarantine, reconstruct, and reconcile must be designed before the first action.
Incident response is established; playbooks for agent identity, memory, tools, and autonomous side effects are still forming.
Why it matters
Stop, revoke, quarantine, reconstruct, and reconcile must be designed before the first action.
The operating shift is from “Generic application incident handling” to “Identity-, action-, and outcome-aware response.”
System anatomy
- Practice 1
- Correlate intent, identity, tool, policy, approval, and outcome traces
- Practice 2
- Rehearse revoke, quarantine, rollback, and human escalation paths
- Practice 3
- Reconcile external effects and turn failures into regression evaluations
Important distinctions
- Generic application incident handling
- This concept moves the engineering system toward identity-, action-, and outcome-aware response.
Implementation signals
- Correlate intent, identity, tool, policy, approval, and outcome traces
- Rehearse revoke, quarantine, rollback, and human escalation paths
- Reconcile external effects and turn failures into regression evaluations
Failure modes
- Stopping one process while credentials or delegated tasks remain active
- Destroying the evidence needed to reconstruct scope and downstream impact
Sources and further study
- OWASP GenAI Security Project — State of Agentic AI Security and Governance 2.01
A current threat and governance synthesis covering instruction-data confusion, containment gaps, autonomous action, and agentic incident readiness.
Use in this library: Official guidance. Guidance describes recommended practice; citation does not prove that a control is implemented or effective in a particular environment.
guidance · guidance · Published 2026-06-01 - Microsoft Agentic Center of Excellence — Govern agents by risk
Current enterprise guidance for matching review depth, autonomy limits, release gates, logging, and incident planning to agent risk.
Use in this library: Official guidance. Guidance describes recommended practice; citation does not prove that a control is implemented or effective in a particular environment.
guidance · guidance · Published 2026-07-14 - Microsoft Entra Agent ID — Administrative relationships in Microsoft Entra Agent ID
Separates technical ownership from business sponsorship and assigns sponsors lifecycle, access-review, and incident-response decisions.
Use in this library: Official guidance. Guidance describes recommended practice; citation does not prove that a control is implemented or effective in a particular environment.
guidance · guidance · Published 2026-04-08 - OpenAI — How we monitor internal coding agents for misalignment
A current account of monitoring powerful coding agents that can act inside consequential development environments.
Use in this library: First-party case study. This first-party account documents one organization, product, or implementation context and should not be generalized without local evidence.
engineering · engineering · Published 2026-03-19