AI Agents Break in 3 Predictable Ways (And How to Fix Them)

AI agents can take real actions when given tool access, shifting risk from wrong answers to wrong actions.

Three common production failures are tool misuse, prompt injection/context attacks, and unbounded decisions.

Existing measures—prompt engineering, guardrails, and post-checks—cannot enforce decisions at runtime.

A control layer that evaluates deterministic policies at decision time can allow or block agent actions.

The author released Actra, an open-source in-process policy engine to define and enforce such policies.