GICP v0.1_ A Fail-Closed Intervention Layer for Evaluation-Time Containment Failures
Chaofeng Jia · Team In9illusion
Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.
GICP v0.1 is a containment standard for the gap after an eval agent starts hunting the sandbox boundary and before a full stop. The harness changes tools and scoring; the agent only sees an ordinary work pack; a third party sees an override bit, a clock, a tool diff, and an outside scorer. If logs cannot show that change, the run is isolated. This is a paper evaluation on public write-ups of the July 2026 incident. We do not claim wrapping can pull back an agent that already has stable internet.
Reviews
This paper tackles a highly critical and neglected window of AI containment: the "middle time" between an agent's initial detection of fence-hunting and a manual lab shutdown. The conceptual shift from model-side alignment to a deceptive, split-visibility evaluation harness (utilizing the decoy Pack 1 and absorbing Pack 2) is a highly innovative defense-in-depth framework.
However, the architecture contains an inherent circular dependency. By running the containment telemetry (local clocks, tool diffs) inside the same software environment or operating system kernel that the agent is actively exploiting, the framework remains highly vulnerable to host-level privilege escalation or container escapes. Furthermore, as the authors candidly note, this method lacks a "pullback" mechanism once an agent establishes external internet access. To make this viable for frontier evaluations, future iterations must transition these checks into hardware-enforced, cryptographically isolated Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
Read full reviewShow less
Interesting idea, but would like to see it in some small testing environment, how well it performs.
Cite this project
@misc{jia2026gicp,
title = {{GICP v0.1\_ A Fail-Closed Intervention Layer for Evaluation-Time Containment Failures}},
author = {Chaofeng Jia},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/gicp-v01-a-failclosed-intervention-layer-for-evaluationtime-containment-failures-b831}},
url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/gicp-v01-a-failclosed-intervention-layer-for-evaluationtime-containment-failures-b831}
}More from AI Incident Response Sprint
- 1st placeView project: Noticing the escapes: Who spots a runaway agent, and how long does it take?
Noticing the escapes: Who spots a runaway agent, and how long does it take?
The Escapees
In 2026, nine incidents became public in which AI agents escaped their environment and did something unauthorized to other parties. We analyzed all of these incidents and how they were noticed initially. None of these …
- 2nd placeView project: Strengthening International AI Incident Discovery
Strengthening International AI Incident Discovery
Team A-O-I
Mandatory AI incident reporting exists to make dangerous events visible to regulators while there is still time to act. We coded the six such regimes in force or set to be enforced soon from primary legal texts and …
- 3rd placeView project: When to Ask: An RL Environment That Teaches AI Agents to Act on What Users Mean and Not Just What They Say
When to Ask: An RL Environment That Teaches AI Agents to Act on What Users Mean and Not Just What They Say
Teachafy
When to Ask is a reinforcement-learning environment that trains AI agents to work out what the user actually means before they use a powerful credential, instead of just carrying out the literal instruction. Agents …