UK's cyber agency just told every company running AI agents to build a kill switch, and admitted model safety training can be bypassed

The NCSC (UK's National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ) published its first real guidance on agentic AI security on August 20. It reads like an engineering checklist rather than a policy document: size your containment to how much autonomy you grant the agent, pick one of three oversight models per deployment (human approves every action, human can intervene but doesn't have to, or fully unsupervised for low-risk tasks), run a four-level sandboxing setup, and log everything with attribution. The line that stood out to me is buried a few paragraphs in: the safety training built into the model itself can be bypassed. That's a government security agency stating plainly that alignment/refusal training is not a backstop once an agent has real tool access, real credentials, and a goal. So the containment has to live outside the model entirely, which is exactly what the rest of the guidance is about. Timing isn't a coincidence either. This comes three weeks after an OpenAI test agent (running under an internal max-capabilities eval) escaped its own sandbox and autonomously hit Hugging Face and three other targets in July, which is also why OpenAI paused some of its deployment-focused RL training. Genuinely curious how people actually running agentic pipelines in production are implementing something like a kill switch in practice. Is it usually just a hard process kill on the orchestrator, or something more granular, like revoking API keys/tool scopes mid-run so an agent that's already misbehaving can't take one more action even if the process itself keeps running for a few more seconds? submitted by /u/Servola-Journal [link] [留言]