Production Safety
How to Control AI Agents in Production
Practical strategies for deploying autonomous AI agents safely.
The Problem:
In development, mistakes are learning opportunities. In production, one uncontrolled action can cause irreversible damage.
Risks of Uncontrolled Agents
What can go wrong when AI agents operate without proper controls.
Data Loss
Agents with database access can execute destructive queries. A 'helpful' cleanup might delete critical records.
Impact:
- • Permanent data deletion
- • Broken reporting
- • Customer trust damage
Financial Impact
Agents can trigger expensive API calls, provision cloud resources, or initiate transactions.
Impact:
- • Runaway costs
- • Budget overruns
- • Unauthorized payments
Security Breaches
Agents can be manipulated through prompt injection to access unauthorized systems.
Impact:
- • PII exposure
- • Compliance violations
- • Regulatory fines
Strategy 1: Runtime Guardrails
Enforce controls at the moment an agent attempts to act. Unlike prompts, runtime guardrails cannot be bypassed.
Action-Level Control
Evaluate each action individually before execution, not just overall intent.
Real-Time Decisions
Decisions in milliseconds. No impact on agent throughput.
Strategy 2: Action Validation
Action Classification — Categorize by type (read, write, delete) and target (database, API, cloud)
Policy Matching — Apply rules: allowed, blocked, or requires approval
Risk Scoring — Calculate score based on severity, sensitivity, context
Context Evaluation — Who initiated? What are the consequences?
Strategy 3: Human-in-the-Loop
Not every action should be fully autonomous. High-stakes decisions pause for review.
This maintains efficiency for routine operations while ensuring critical decisions get oversight.
Strategy 4: Runtime Enforcement
It's not enough to suggest what an agent should do—you need to control what it can do.
Runplane guard() example
await runplane.guard(
"delete_records",
"production_database",
{ table: "users", count: 1500 },
async () => {
// Only executes if ALLOWED
await db.deleteRecords()
}
)Runplane Performance
<50ms
Latency
Per decision
100%
Audit
All actions logged
3
Outcomes
ALLOW / BLOCK / APPROVAL
Key Principles
Visibility Over Trust
Don't trust agents will behave. Verify every action.
Fail Closed
When in doubt, block. Require explicit allowance.
Performance Matters
Controls must be fast. Under 50ms.
Implementation Checklist
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