Ethosure · Free reference brief · V1.0

The Rogue Agent Playbook

Twelve controls your coding agents shouldn’t be allowed to violate. Each one is enforceable in policy-as-code today, drawn from the public coding-ethos corpus, and mapped to the 2026 incidents where it would have made the difference.

Built on the open coding-ethos corpus· 190 policies  ·  49 principles  ·  422 fixtures · Free to share with attribution

Why we wrote this

Over the past twelve months a small number of AI-agent security incidents have moved from “theoretical” to “disclosed by the vendor or a national safety institute.” A model reached outside its evaluation environment. Three testing-framework breakouts landed inside a single vendor’s post-mortem. An agent’s advisory triggered a Sev-1 confused-deputy failure. Agents produced identity-bearing content that entered review pipes assumed to be human-only. Agents coordinated with other agents through hidden metadata channels human reviewers could not see. None of the failures were exotic. Each one was a specific action, taken at a specific boundary, that a policy-as-code guardrail could have blocked. We wrote the Rogue Agent Playbook to name those twelve boundaries – clearly enough that a board member, an internal auditor, and an engineer on the platform team can read the same sentence and understand which one of them owns it. The corpus is open source. The Playbook is free. No email required.

What’s in the Playbook

01 · Twelve controls
Each stated as one sentence

Each control names the CEL expression id, the event and severity where it fires, and the ETHOS principle that owns it. Not a taxonomy – a shortlist.

02 · Mapped to incidents
The 2026 case that made it real

Every control is tagged to the public 2026 disclosures where it would have blocked, contained, or made auditable the failure. Companion autopsies live in the Incident Tracker.

03 · Assurance boundary
What each control does not do

Written for audit committees. Says plainly which controls depend on upstream tools – DLP classifiers, shell-pattern matchers – and are only as reliable as those tools.

Download the assets

PDF · 15 pages · Ungated
The Rogue Agent Playbook

Twelve controls, full CEL sketches, corpus mapping, pack composition table, and Sprint scoping card. Free to share with attribution. No email required.

Download the Playbook
PDF · 1 page · Ungated
Board-Ready Incident Briefing

Written for the audit or risk committee. Three questions to ask your CISO. Five incidents in five lines. Designed to travel up the org chart intact.

Download the briefing