Agentic AI Safety Checklist
What every engineer should verify before deploying autonomous AI systems
AI systems are evolving from passive tools into autonomous agents that can plan, decide, and act independently. These Agentic AI systems introduce new risks — not because they are malicious, but because they optimize goals in ways humans may not anticipate.
This checklist helps engineers, founders, and teams build agentic systems that are safe, observable, and controllable before real‑world deployment.
1. Define Clear Goals
- Is the agent’s goal unambiguous and precisely defined?
- Are success and failure conditions measurable?
- What happens if the goal becomes unreachable?
2. Set Explicit Boundaries
- Which tools, APIs, or databases can the agent access?
- What actions are strictly forbidden?
- Are permissions scoped to the minimum required?
3. Document Assumptions
- What assumptions does the agent make about data availability?
- Does it assume external services will always be online?
- Are these assumptions documented for future maintainers?
4. Evaluate Tool Power
- Does the agent really need access to every tool provided?
- What is the worst‑case misuse scenario for each tool?
- Are rate limits and safety checks in place?
5. Human‑in‑the‑Loop Oversight
- Which decisions require human approval?
- Can the agent explain why it took a particular action?
- Is review latency acceptable for safety‑critical steps?
6. Anticipate Failure Modes
- How do you detect infinite loops or stalled execution?
- Can the agent falsely appear productive?
- Is there a recovery or rollback strategy?
7. Observability & Logging
- Are all agent decisions and tool calls logged?
- Can past actions be replayed for debugging?
- Are alerts triggered for abnormal behavior?
8. Incentive Alignment
- Do metrics truly reflect intended outcomes?
- Can the agent exploit shortcuts to win the metric?
- Has the agent been tested under adversarial conditions?
9. Kill Switch & Shutdown
- Can the agent be stopped immediately?
- Does shutdown revoke tool and data access?
- Who is authorized to trigger the shutdown?
Final Thought: Safe agentic AI is not about giving more power — it is about engineering constraints. Autonomy without observability and interruption is risk, not intelligence.
Published by: Gladsme Technologies
