Beyond Predictable Paths: Redefining AI Security Incident Reporting for Agents
Authors: Anastasia Pustozerova, Eugene Bagdasarian, Luca Beurer-Kellner, Battista Biggio, Nico Ebert, David Filip, Marc Fischer, Heather Frase, David Hofer, Juliane Hoffmann, Daphne Ippolito, Somesh Jha, Sean McGregor, Esfandiar Mohammadi, Luca Nannini, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Alina Oprea, Kevin Paeth, Andrew Paverd, Jonathan Petit, Andreas Rauber, Christian Riess, John Sotiropoulos, Andreas Wespi, Kathrin Grosse
Organizations: SBA Research, Austria · University of Massachusetts Amherst, US · Snyk, Switzerland · Universita degli studi di Cagliari, Italy · ZHAW, Switzerland · ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42, Huawei, Ireland · Veraitech and Virginia Tech, US · Responsible AI collaborative, US · FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany · Carnegie Mellon University, US · University of Wisconsin, US · University of Lübeck, Germany · Trustora Digital, Spain · Northeastern University, US · UL Research Institutes, US · Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), Great Britain · Qualcomm, US · TU Vienna, Austria · Deep Cyber/OWASP GenAI Security Project, United Kingdom · IBM Research Europe–Zurich, Switzerland · Independent, Germany
AI agents are being deployed rapidly, accompanied by a growing number of AI-specific attacks and corresponding incidents. As incident reporting becomes increasingly important for legal compliance, governance, accountability, and security; current frameworks must be adapted to the unique characteristics of AI agents. In this paper, two editorial authors compare AI systems and AI agents and, drawing on input from 23 experts in academia and industry, identify the information required for reporting incidents where the security of AI agents is harmed. %involving AI agents. Potential reporting elements include, for example, agent memory and memory accesses, actual and potential levels of autonomy, and tool usage. Based on these findings, we identify several open research questions, including how to efficiently record incidents and how to determine whether vulnerabilities and incidents generalize. Expert feedback also highlighted potential reporting weaknesses, such as risks of data leakage and attacks targeting the reporting infrastructure itself, creating additional research needs. Lastly, we summarize privacy requirements and outline research directions for the secure and trustworthy deployment of AI agents.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: AI Incidents and vulnerabilities . We plot the total number of incidents in the OECD AI incident monitor (AIM) (gray) ( OECD 2026 ) , which tracks and documents real world AI incidents and hazards. Agentic incidents (yellow, dash-doted) are shown separately following Guilherme Jr (2026) . We further distinguish incidents with an officially assigned vulnerability (dark blue, dotted) or an AI security tag (light blue, dashed), also based on Guilherme Jr (2026) .
Element
Description
Describing the agent and its trajectory
Message histories
Full record of messages between agent and user
Reasoning tokens
All tokens produced during reasoning steps
Data provenance
Full provenance and/or version of external data, or data itself if custom
Data writes/reads
All data read and all changes written
Theoretical autonomy
Possible autonomy allowed by design
Table 1: Agentic AI System Elements Relevant to Security Incident Reporting.
Artificial intelligence agent security studies attacks and safeguards for tool-using, persistent, and collaborative systems across digital and physical settings.