SAFETY.md
Safety and permission system
Document threats, assets, identities, authority boundaries, least-privilege controls, approval policies, data protections, abuse cases, and incident response for agent behavior and tool use.
Fillable structure
Replace prompts with project evidence.
Remove any field that does not apply. A smaller maintained file is more useful than generic documentation that agents and reviewers cannot trust.
- 01
Threat model
Identify what must be protected and how the agent can be manipulated or misused.
Assets: List data, credentials, money, systems, reputation, and human safety concerns
Actors: List users, operators, external content authors, attackers, services, and agents
Threats: Cover prompt injection, exfiltration, privilege escalation, fraud, destructive action, and unsafe advice
- 02
Identity and permissions
Bind every action to an authenticated actor and current resource-level authority.
Identity: Define user, service, tenant, session, agent, and delegated identity
Permission model: Map roles or attributes to tools, resources, actions, and environments
Credential handling: Define issuance, scoping, storage, rotation, revocation, and audit
- 03
Approvals and safeguards
Use deterministic controls and meaningful approval previews before consequential action.
Approval matrix: Map risk tiers to preview, confirmation, second reviewer, or prohibited status
Runtime controls: Define allowlists, limits, sandboxing, validation, output filtering, and rate controls
User control: Provide inspect, edit, cancel, undo, revoke, delete, and escalation paths
- 04
Verification and response
Continuously test controls and prepare for containment and recovery.
Safety tests: List adversarial, cross-tenant, approval-bypass, data-leak, and unsafe-action cases
Monitoring: Define high-risk action, denial, anomaly, policy, and audit signals
Incident response: Define containment, credential revocation, evidence preservation, communication, and follow-up
Related field guides
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RUNBOOK.md · Agent operations runbook