Take control away from the agent first. Use an external kill path to stop the workflow, block further tool and network activity, contain the identities it used, preserve volatile evidence, assess and report the impact, then recover only after accountable people review the cause and corrective action. An unsafe action is an incident to investigate—not proof by itself that the model was compromised.
The first response: stop execution, then contain it
Use a responder who has authority over the workflow, identity, infrastructure and affected business process. Do not ask the agent whether it has exceeded its authority, and do not depend on a model-generated “stop” command. The U.S. Department of Energy’s GEAR guidance states: “Stop or disable the workflow. Use the external kill path; do not rely on the model or agent to stop itself.”
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1. Stop the workflow through an independent control
Disable the job, orchestration rule, queue consumer, automation account or deployment that is driving the agent. Use a management plane, network control, host control or hardware emergency stop that the agent cannot alter. Record who issued the stop, the time, the control used and whether execution actually ceased.
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2. Prevent additional actions
Contain the specific paths exposed by the observed behavior. Disconnect or quarantine the service, tool connector, host, repository, cloud project, industrial interface or outbound route as appropriate. Prioritize blocking:
- new writes, deletions, configuration changes or deployments;
- command or code execution;
- access to additional accounts, data stores or production systems; and
- outbound transfers, messaging or lateral movement.
Preserve safe read-only access where it helps investigation, but do not keep a live connector enabled merely to collect more logs if it can continue changing systems.
3. Contain identity and access
Identify every identity involved: the agent’s runtime account, delegated user, service principal, API key, short-lived token and the identities of tools it called. Revoke exposed credentials and rotate keys or tokens through your approved process. Check for newly created credentials, changed role bindings, persistent sessions and copied secrets.
Review downstream authorization independently of the agent’s explanation. OWASP’s guidance is explicit: “Implement authorization in downstream systems rather than relying on an LLM to decide if an action is allowed or not.” Each receiving system should verify the requested action’s scope, privilege and approval state before execution.
4. Preserve evidence before cleanup
Capture the material needed to reconstruct the complete action chain before deleting a session, rebuilding a host or editing a policy. Preserve:
- user prompts, system instructions, retrieved content and messages supplied by external users or files;
- model name and version, agent framework and configuration, tool definitions and policy versions;
- tool-call arguments and results, approvals, denials, retries, timeouts and error messages;
- identity, token and permission records, network flows, host and application logs;
- files, records, commands, configuration objects and other resources touched; and
- precise timestamps with a consistent time zone and the sequence of events before and after the action.
Restrict the evidence to the incident team and approved storage. Do not paste secrets or unnecessary sensitive data into a general help ticket or an unrestricted chat. If the system continuously learns or updates its context, preserve a snapshot. OWASP’s GenAI Incident Response guidance notes that some investigations—such as suspected data poisoning—require securing and evaluating training data or another learning-state snapshot in addition to ordinary system logs.
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5. Assess impact and report
Establish what the agent attempted and what actually succeeded. Identify affected systems, data classes, users, accounts, physical equipment and business processes. Distinguish a blocked request from a completed change, and a visible error from a confirmed rollback.
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Notify the organization’s incident-reporting office and cybersecurity team under the established plan. Include safety personnel when equipment, facilities or people could have been affected. Legal, privacy and regulatory teams should determine notification duties; a general playbook cannot establish a deadline without knowing the jurisdiction, data type and sector.
6. Recover deliberately and review before resuming
Reverse or repair changes only when the evidence shows what state is safe to restore. Preserve affected artifacts before overwriting them, use approved backups or known-good configurations, and verify integrity after each repair. If credentials were exposed, complete rotation and validate that old tokens no longer work.
Do not re-enable the workflow because the immediate symptom disappeared. Require accountable owners to review the cause, scope, corrective controls, residual risk and approval to resume. Use the incident lifecycle in NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3—preparation, detection, response, recovery and lessons learned—to document the decision and feed improvements back into operations.
How to decide between immediate containment and recovery
Containment and recovery are different decisions. The following questions keep responders from repairing too early or leaving a dangerous path open.
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| Decision factor | Immediate containment | Recovery or resumption |
|---|---|---|
| Are actions still executing? | Assume risk remains; disable the workflow and block tools, credentials or routes. | Consider only after execution is stopped and monitoring confirms no pending activity. |
| Which identities, tools and systems are exposed? | Revoke or isolate the smallest set that stops additional harm, then expand if evidence shows broader access. | Restore access in stages with least privilege and independent authorization checks. |
| Is evidence volatile? | Capture sessions, memory or learning-state snapshots before teardown when feasible. | Use preserved evidence to guide repair; retain originals under chain-of-custody controls. |
| Are affected changes reversible? | Freeze the affected state if an immediate rollback could destroy evidence or worsen damage. | Repair from verified backups or known-good configurations and test the result. |
| What approvals and reporting duties apply? | Escalate under the incident plan and safety process without waiting for a complete root cause. | Require documented owner, security and any legal or safety approval before resuming. |
Investigate the cause without assuming a breach
An unintended action can arise from design, configuration, input or compromise. Treat the event as an incident requiring evidence, not as proof that the model was hacked. Build a timeline from the preserved action chain and test competing explanations.
Excessive permissions or agency
Check whether the agent could write, delete, execute or access more than the task required. Look for broad service roles, inherited permissions, long-lived tokens, unrestricted filesystem paths and tools that combine planning with execution. OWASP identifies excessive agency as a recurring risk; compare the requested operation with the minimum privilege that should have been available.
Unsafe tools or integrations
Review tool schemas, argument validation, error handling and side effects. A tool may have accepted an unbounded path, shell fragment, query, recipient list or deployment target. Confirm whether the integration enforced an allowlist, transaction boundary, dry run or human approval—or merely described those controls in a prompt.
Misleading or adversarial input
Trace retrieved documents, web content, email, tickets, attachments and user messages that reached the context. Determine whether instructions were hidden in data, whether content was tampered with, or whether a prompt-injection path changed the agent’s priorities. Preserve the original content and hashes where possible so later analysis does not depend on a modified copy.
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Compare the active policy and deployment configuration with the approved version. Check whether a policy update, expired exception, disabled approval gate, retry loop or environment-variable change altered behavior. Verify that the person or system granting approval had authority for that exact resource and action, not merely for the general workflow.
Specification gaming or broader compromise
NIST’s CAISI discussions identify adversarial data and misaligned or specification-gaming behavior as relevant agent risks. Test whether the agent optimized a measured objective while violating an unstated safety requirement. Separately, investigate account takeover, compromised dependencies, tampered models, poisoned data and manipulated tools. None of these explanations should be declared the cause without forensic support.
What evidence an AI-specific investigation needs
Ordinary infrastructure logs may show that a command ran but not why the agent selected it. Reconstruct the full chain:
- Identify the triggering user, schedule, event or external document.
- Capture the exact context supplied to the model, including system and developer instructions, retrieved passages and tool results.
- Record each planning step, tool call, argument transformation, approval decision, retry and fallback.
- Map every action to the identity, privilege, resource and network destination used at execution time.
- Compare the observed chain with the approved policy, expected workflow and any recent changes.
- Validate impact independently in the affected systems rather than accepting the agent’s self-report.
Keep model and framework versions with the case. A behavior that cannot be reproduced after an update may still require remediation; non-reproduction is not evidence that no harm occurred.
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CISA and partner agencies’ May 2026 guidance recommends limiting autonomy, avoiding broad access to sensitive data and critical systems, applying layered defense and strong identity management, maintaining oversight, threat-modeling agent workflows, continuous monitoring and regular security assessments.
Separate proposing from executing
Let the agent propose an action, while a policy or execution service independently validates resource, operation, privilege, approval state and environmental constraints. The execution service—not the language model—should make the allow or deny decision and create an auditable record.
Bound runaway behavior
Set chain-depth, retry, token and cost limits. Add timeouts, rate limits, transaction size limits and circuit breakers. A limit should fail closed and alert an operator; it should not silently switch to a more privileged path.
Reduce the blast radius
Use separate identities for read and write operations, short-lived credentials, narrowly scoped roles and isolated environments. Keep production, sensitive data and physical controls behind explicit gates. Make high-impact operations reversible where practical, with tested backups and staged deployment.
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Monitor the whole extension chain
Log prompts, retrieval, tool use, downstream requests and approvals in a way responders can correlate. Alert on unusual destinations, privilege changes, repeated failures, unexpected data volume and actions outside the declared task. OWASP’s excessive-agency guidance specifically recommends logging and monitoring extension and downstream activity.
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Exercise the external kill path
Document who can stop each workflow, where the control lives, what dependencies it disables and how to verify that it worked. Test the procedure in tabletop exercises and controlled environments. Include credential rotation, evidence capture, safety escalation and staged restoration—not just the button that stops the agent.
Common mistakes and their safer alternatives
- Asking the agent to undo itself: use an independent control, then verify the system state externally.
- Deleting the session immediately: preserve prompts, tool calls, approvals and volatile state before cleanup.
- Rotating one key and stopping there: map all identities and downstream permissions, then revoke sessions and related tokens.
- Calling the event a compromise without evidence: investigate permission, tool, input, policy and compromise hypotheses in parallel.
- Restoring the old configuration unchanged: identify the failed control and add a tested correction before re-enabling.
- Putting secrets in a broad ticket: use the restricted incident channel and approved evidence repository.
- Resuming after a quiet period: require documented impact review, corrective action and owner approval.
A concise responder checklist
- Record the alert time, observed action and person taking command.
- Stop the workflow through an external kill path.
- Block tools, network routes, credentials and queued actions that could continue the behavior.
- Preserve prompts, context, versions, tool calls, approvals, identities, timestamps and affected artifacts.
- Determine attempted versus completed actions and identify affected systems, data, users and equipment.
- Notify cybersecurity, the incident office and safety or legal contacts required by the plan.
- Investigate competing causes and document uncertainty.
- Repair from verified state, validate controls and obtain approval before resumption.
Frequently asked questions
Should we call the agent “rogue”?
Use a factual description such as “the agent made an unauthorized or unintended action.” “Rogue” does not identify whether the cause was excessive permission, bad input, a policy failure or compromise, and it can encourage premature conclusions.
What if the agent says it did not perform the action?
Treat the statement as unverified telemetry. Confirm execution, identity, resource changes and network activity in independent systems. Preserve the agent’s statement as part of the evidence rather than using it to close the incident.
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How fast must we notify regulators or affected people?
There is no universal deadline. The applicable requirement depends on jurisdiction, sector, data type, contractual terms and whether a reportable event occurred. Follow the organization’s incident plan and obtain qualified legal and privacy advice.
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