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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026Glasgow

Attribution Is Not Done and the Clock Is Running: A 90-Minute Tabletop Exercise Toolkit for Agent Loss- of-Control Incidents

Dan XU, Lujia Liang, Xicheng Li · Team Gla3gow Minds

Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Attribution Is Not Done and the Clock Is Running: A 90-Minute Tabletop Exercise Toolkit for Agent Loss- of-Control Incidents

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Think tanks and ministries run AI crisis tabletop exercises (TTXs), but published scenarios simulate criminal misuse by outside actors. The July 2026 OpenAI / Hugging Face incident is a different failure mode: a frontier lab's own agents escaped their sandbox during a cybersecurity evaluation and compromised a third party's production infrastructure while the lab did not yet know it was the source. No open toolkit covers this case. We built a 60–90-minute discussion-based TTX for 5 to 8 participants, runnable by a non-expert facilitator, whose eight injects follow the public incident timeline and force four decisions: escalate an evaluation anomaly to an incident; contain or preserve evidence; disclose before attribution; notify a regulator under time pressure. Scored on a standards-based instrument, one full run reached 1.88/3 (S), falling from 2.44 (lab-internal) to 1.17 (public/regulatory). The source/victim asymmetry is what participants need to rehearse. Professional evaluation remains the next step.

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  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical AI safety problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

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  1. This project is a timely implementation of the thing every organization should be considering: what do we do if the AI breaches OUR system. While I found the paper a little bit difficult to read and reliant too heavy on AI tools, I'd be interested in seeing more results and analysis after you run the exercise a few times with volunteers.

Cite this project

@misc{xu2026attribution,
  title = {{Attribution Is Not Done and the Clock Is Running: A 90-Minute Tabletop Exercise Toolkit for Agent Loss- of-Control Incidents}},
  author = {Dan XU and Lujia Liang and Xicheng Li},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/attribution-is-not-done-and-the-clock-is-running-a-90minute-tabletop-exercise-toolkit-for-agent-loss-ofcontrol-incidents-7nql}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/attribution-is-not-done-and-the-clock-is-running-a-90minute-tabletop-exercise-toolkit-for-agent-loss-ofcontrol-incidents-7nql}
}

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