Glossary — Agentic AI

What is Agent Safety?

1 min read Updated

Principles, practices, and infrastructure preventing AI agents from causing harm — including financial harm through unauthorized spending, market manipulation, or fund loss.

WHY IT MATTERS

Multi-dimensional: behavioral safety (content), operational safety (systems), financial safety (money). Financial is often the most overlooked.

Teams focus on content filtering while giving agents unrestricted wallet access. A single financial mishap causes more damage than thousands of bad text responses.

Requires defense in depth: key management, spending controls, audit trails, circuit breakers, kill switches.

HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS

PolicyLayer addresses financial safety — spending controls, velocity monitoring, anomaly detection, and kill switches preventing financial harm.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What's the biggest financial safety risk?
Unrestricted wallet access combined with prompt injection. An attacker can manipulate the agent into transferring all funds. Infrastructure-level controls (PolicyLayer) prevent this regardless of the attack.
Is agent safety different from AI safety?
Related but distinct. AI safety broadly addresses alignment, bias, and existential risk. Agent safety focuses on the practical harm autonomous agents can cause, including financial damage.
Minimum viable safety for an agent with a wallet?
At minimum: per-transaction limits, a daily spending cap, a recipient allowlist, and a kill switch. PolicyLayer provides all of these out of the box.

FURTHER READING

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