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Sprint projectSep 13, 2026New Jersey

Incident Twins: What Logs Can Establish After an Agent Stops

Rohith Yanambaka Venkata

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

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Report: Incident Twins: What Logs Can Establish After an Agent Stops

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After an agent stops, what can its logs establish about accepted work? Incident Twins checks whether retained evidence rules out in-scope commitments during a fixed post-stop interval. Study 1 uses scripted responses in Pydantic AI. Three asynchronous pairs have byte-identical configured native/controller records but opposite outcomes. Terminal receipts and a separate pending-work check distinguish outcome evidence from collection coverage. Study 2 tests whether effects can commit without audit records. In 30 process-interruption runs, separate transactions leave such gaps. A joint effect/audit transaction with a complete scoped snapshot resolves all 15 comparator runs. A simple query matches all 30 measured runs, but concludes on a contradictory control that the richer checker rejects. Study 2’s raw records differ: its opposing examples match only on declared selected fields. Neither study establishes permanent containment or permission to resume. I list what an operator should retain. The resulting verdict depends on explicit scope and trust.

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  1. I like that the project asks a very specific and practical question: what can we actually conclude from the evidence after an agent has stopped? The experiments are thoughtful, especially the use of paired outcomes and contradictory controls rather than only showing successful cases. My main suggestion would be to test this on more realistic agent systems and failure modes, since the current setup is still fairly controlled.

  2. This is a very important problem to be working on, I really like this direction, as covert side-effects can evade a plethora of current control and gating mechanisms. "incident twins" is a very good name for this phenomenon.

    The report could use a bit more clarity and succinctness.

Cite this project

@misc{venkata2026incident,
  title = {{Incident Twins: What Logs Can Establish After an Agent Stops}},
  author = {Rohith Yanambaka Venkata},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/incident-twins-what-logs-can-establish-after-an-agent-stops-bywm}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/incident-twins-what-logs-can-establish-after-an-agent-stops-bywm}
}

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