Runtime Enforcement for AI Agents

Overview

Runtime enforcement governs what AI agents may do while they are running, especially when tool calls can change files, access data, spend money, or control devices. Common approaches intercept actions at a trusted boundary and apply permissions, policies, behavioral contracts, or formal checks; other systems track action history and provenance, require human approval, or verify effects before committing them. These controls are studied in settings such as coding and web agents, financial workflows, scientific tools, and robotics, with benchmarks measuring both blocked attacks and preserved task success. A central challenge is balancing safety with useful autonomy: policies must account for context and changing state, while evidence for guarantees often remains limited to specific environments and assumptions.

Latest papers

CardsList

279 papers81 papers in the last four weeks, up 8% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.

  1. ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents

    Aug 21, 2026Kai Wang, Zeming Wei, BiaoJie Zeng +7AI Agent SecurityAI Agent Monitoring

  2. Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses

    Aug 20, 2026Varun Pratap Bhardwaj, Garima Singh, Arun Pratap BhardwajLLM Agent HarnessesRuntime Enforcement for AI Agents

  3. PACE: Policy-Attested Contract Execution for Safe AI Agents in Decentralized Finance

    Aug 18, 2026Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Richard Williamson +5AI Agent SafetyRuntime Enforcement for AI Agents

  4. SkillEffect: Checked Lowering for Memory-Bounded Agent Tools

    Aug 17, 2026Yinuo Wang, Yiyu ShiRuntime Enforcement for AI AgentsTool-Using Agents

  5. A Policy Algebra for Trust-Preserving Agentic AI Execution

    Aug 17, 2026Bhaskar Tripathi, Anurag Kumar, Ramendra Kumar +1AI Agent ReliabilityRuntime Enforcement for AI Agents

  6. Ensuring Safe Physical AI in Urban Mobility via Hazard-Informed Synthesized Envelopes

    Aug 14, 2026Alexei Odinokov, Rostislav YavorskiyRobot SafetyRuntime Enforcement for AI Agents

  7. Agent Safety Should Be a Runtime Contract

    Aug 11, 2026Albus W. Ng, Yi Han, Jusheng Zhang +1AI Agent SafetyAI Agent Monitoring

  8. NiyamAI - An Intent-Bound AI Agent with Cryptographically Verifiable Guardrails using Zero-Knowledge Proofs

    Aug 7, 2026Aditya Katkar, Om Karkele, Kartik Mandhane +2Tool-Augmented Language Model AgentsLLM Guardrails

  9. DreamGuard: Efficient Runtime Guardrail for LLM Agents via Risk-Aware World Model

    Aug 6, 2026Wenhao Lin, Chenyu Yu, Xingwei Lin +6LLM World ModelsLLM Guardrails

  10. Explanation-Bound Tool Execution for AI Agents: Server-Verified Action Claims Without Trusting Model Rationales

    Jul 28, 2026Genliang Zhu, Chu WangLLM Agent SecurityLLM Agent Verification

  11. GuardianAgentBench: Where Agents Fail and How to Guard Them

    Jul 23, 2026Vishal Ishwar Naik, Chenyu Xu, Donna Dong +5AI Agent ReliabilityLLM Guardrails

  12. Compile, Then Page: Executable SOP Programs and a Capability-Gated Runtime for Procedural LLM Agents

    Jul 13, 2026Chenglin Yu, Li Yin, Ying Yu +4Instruction FollowingRuntime Enforcement for AI Agents

  13. aiAuthZ: Off-Host, Identity-Bound Authorization for AI Agents

    Jul 6, 2026Sai Varun KodathalaAI Agent SecurityLLM Agent Security

  14. Governed Individuation: Cryptographically Decoupling an Agent's Learning from Its Authority

    Jul 6, 2026Xue Qin, Simin Luan, Cong Yang +1AI Agent SecurityAI Agent Safety

  15. Certified Speculative Execution for Untrusted AI Agents

    Jun 30, 2026Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu +1AI Agent ReliabilityConstrained RL

  16. TellOnce: Correcting Coding Agents Once, Improving Their Future Actions

    Jun 11, 2026Yujun Zhou, Kehan Guo, Haomin Zhuang +8Coding AgentsLLM Agent Memory