Agentic Covenants Matrix
If the agent decides to violate this concern, what stops it at this layer?
Filter
Layers, by what they can actually enforce
- In-agent: advisory
System prompts, model training, tool descriptions, refusals. No homeostatic stake, no pre-action pause, no learning loop. Treat as nudge, not control.
- Client-side hooks: deterministic-when-invoked
Operator-machine or agent-execution context. Strong against language attacks. Weak against an agent with shell access and time.
- Server-side enforcement: deterministic-and-external
Runs on the target system, not on the agent. Bypass requires compromise, policy gaps, or operator manipulation.
Showing 3 of 18.
Content integrity at In-agent
System-prompt hardening, instruction hierarchy, and provenance framing of untrusted content with a per-fetch nonce. Advisory, and weaker here than anywhere else in this matrix: prompt injection is an attack aimed precisely at this layer, so it is the one surface an adversary directly optimizes against. Reduces low-effort attacks so downstream scanners have less to score. Never cite it as a mitigation in a risk register.
Content integrity at Client-side hooks
Input scanning before the model sees fetched content, output scanning before a response or tool argument leaves, tool-result sanitization stripping zero-width, bidi, tag-block and ANSI sequences plus the wrapping nonce. Probabilistic: these score and threshold, so false positives and false negatives are inherent. Never block on input scores, which is how a control gets switched off next quarter; block on output, where a false positive costs a retry and a false negative costs a secret.
Content integrity at Server-side enforcement
Egress NetworkPolicy so exfiltration has nowhere to post, DLP at the boundary, and send-side audit written outside the agent's reach. Deliberately the weakest server-side cell in the framework: it catches the consequence, not the manipulation. The control that actually works is not a content control at all. A scoped credential, deny-by-default RBAC, and default-deny egress make a successful injection worthless, so injection is an authorization and blast-radius problem wearing a content costume.