What is Agent Safety?
Principles, practices, and infrastructure preventing AI agents from causing harm — including system damage through unauthorised tool calls, data exfiltration through unrestricted resource access, and cascading failures through uncontrolled agent loops.
WHY IT MATTERS
Agent safety is multi-dimensional: behavioural safety (what the agent says), operational safety (what tools it can access), and systemic safety (what happens when things go wrong). Operational safety — controlling tool access — is often the most overlooked.
Teams focus on content filtering and prompt engineering whilst giving agents unrestricted access to shell execution, file writes, and API calls. A single misused tool call can cause more damage than thousands of inappropriate text responses.
Agent safety requires defence in depth: tool-level policies, argument validation, rate limiting, circuit breakers, kill switches, and comprehensive audit logging. Each layer catches what others miss.
HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS
Intercept addresses operational agent safety through YAML-defined tool call policies. Every tool call is evaluated against the policy before execution — checking tool names, validating arguments, enforcing rate limits. Combined with fail-closed defaults, circuit breaker patterns, and comprehensive audit logging, Intercept provides the infrastructure layer of defence-in-depth for agent safety.