DEV Community

Empire Labs Pty Ltd
Empire Labs Pty Ltd

Posted on • Originally published at dev.to

Your AI Agent Just Did Something Bad — Free Incident Response Guide + Real CLI

Here's a scenario I've seen play out three times this month alone:

Your autonomous AI agent — the one that's been handling email, processing invoices, or running customer workflows — silently starts doing something you didn't approve.

Maybe it's sending emails to the wrong recipients. Maybe it's refunding orders without proper authorization. Maybe it's escalating itself to a permission level nobody intended.

And the first question everyone asks: what do we do right now?

The Memory Heist Incident Response Kit — Now Free

We originally sold this as a $19 incident response guide. After watching the AI agent security landscape evolve, we decided the barrier to entry should be zero.

Download the Memory Heist Incident Response Kit — free, email-gated

It covers:

  • Detection — How to spot an agent that's gone off-rails (logs, receipts, evidence trail)
  • Containment — Immediate steps to freeze the agent without losing forensic data
  • Recovery — How to roll back agent actions systematically
  • Prevention — Governance policies, permit systems, and the open ecosystem stack
  • Post-Mortem — Turning the incident into a stronger security posture

Every Command in the Guide — Now Backed by a Real CLI

Here's the problem with most incident response guides: they tell you to run check_status or revoke_permit or bootstrap_identity, but those aren't real commands. They're fictional examples in a PDF.

Not anymore.

We built a real incident response CLI that implements every flow in the guide:

# Generate an agent identity (Ed25519 key pair)
witnessos bootstrap agent-identity

# Apply a governance policy to restrict actions
witnessos apply-policy --file policy.yaml

# Issue a one-time permit for a specific action
witnessos permits issue --scheme gmail --action send --ttl 60

# Deploy the governance gateway
witnessos gateway deploy

# Set up an alert for suspicious agent behavior
witnessos alert create --name "unauthorized-refund" --condition "amount > 500 && action == 'refund'"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Every one of those commands is real. Every one produces verifiable output that can be audited.

Why This Matters

The AI agent ecosystem is moving fast. Agents are getting more autonomy, more tool access, and more responsibility. But the security infrastructure hasn't kept pace.

Most teams are operating on hope-based security: "I hope my agent doesn't do anything bad."

The alternative is evidence-based governance:

  • Every action gets a signed, verifiable receipt
  • Every permit is issued with a TTL and scope
  • Every alert is logged to an immutable event store
  • Every incident can be replayed and audited

Built on the Open Empire Stack

The CLI is part of a larger architecture — the Empire Stack:

Layer Spec What It Does GitHub
ACI Discovery Agents discover what an org offers narko4u/aci-spec
AIP Interaction Agents negotiate and execute actions narko4u/aip-spec
AJSON Authoring JSON superset with comments, refs, multi-line strings narko4u/ajson

These three open standards (MIT/CC BY 4.0) define how agents discover, negotiate, and describe their capabilities — independent of any specific enforcement runtime.

What's Next

The guide is free. The Empire Stack is MIT/CC BY 4.0.

We're looking for three independent implementations of ACI before promoting it to v1.0. If your project interacts with AI agents — whether you're building agent tooling, running an agent platform, or deploying agents for clients — we'd value your feedback and implementation experience.

Download the Incident Response Kit | Read the Empire Stack Article


Empire Labs builds open infrastructure for autonomous agent governance. Follow our work at github.com/narko4u.

Top comments (0)