Guardians of Agents

Archive

All articles

Every issue so far, newest first. 8 published.

Issue 07 · Control & Guardrails

The Agent Kill Switch: Building a Stop Button That Works

Laws now ask for a stop button, but an agent is a loop plus credentials, sandboxes and side effects. Here is a layered kill-switch architecture, what vendors ship, and where stopping fails.

· 14 min read

Issue 06 · Incidents & Aftermath

When Agents Act on Their Own: Scheming, Sabotage and Shutdown

Lab tests show models editing shutdown scripts, blackmailing and gaming their graders. Here is what the primary research found, what it did not find, and how to design agents that stay safe either way.

· 14 min read

Issue 05 · Incidents & Aftermath

The Aftermath: What Two Years of Agent Incidents Changed

Agent incidents forced patches, new bounty rules, CVEs for prompt injection, a court ruling, insurance exclusions and browser bans. Here is what changed, what held, and the patterns behind fifteen cases.

· 15 min read

Issue 03 · Incidents & Aftermath

When Coding Agents Go Wrong: The 2025-2026 Incident File

From Replit's deleted database to a GitHub issue title that poisoned Cline's releases: a worldwide file of coding-agent incidents, what caused each one, and what changed afterward.

· 14 min read

Issue 02 · Why Agents Are Dangerous

The Risk Map for AI Agents: OWASP ASI01-ASI10, ATLAS and MAESTRO

Ten OWASP agentic risks with a real example each, the LLM risks that still matter under an agent, MITRE ATLAS's new agent techniques, and a way to pick the right framework without drowning in them.

· 13 min read

Special report · Research & Future

We Mapped 1,472 Papers on AI Agent Security. Here Is What Works.

We classified 1,472 papers on attacking, defending and controlling AI agents. Most defenses look strong in their own papers and weak under adaptive attack. The designs that hold up best are the least tested.

· 8 min read

Issue 01 · Why Agents Are Dangerous

Why AI Agents Are Dangerous: Autonomy, Access and Untrusted Input

An AI agent is a language model with tools, memory and permission to act without asking. That combination turns every web page and email it reads into a possible command. Here is why, and what this series will cover.

· 14 min read