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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026San Mateo

Verifiable containment for agentic evals

Harys Dalvi · Team crackalamoo

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

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Report: Verifiable containment for agentic evals

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This is standard that defines which agentic evaluations demand strict containment and specifies, for those, an agent-system sealed from the public internet with no route out. Compliance is verified by an independent auditor from evidence generated below the agent's guest VM, so containment can be verified without exposing the model or the evaluation's contents. Adopting this standard would structurally deny any route out of eval sandboxes, helping prevent frontier labs' agents-under-test from breaching their containment.

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  1. This enforces strict execution boundaries (no egress, disabled IMDS) and preserving below-the-guest audit evidence is a sound architectural approach to preventing containment escapes. The core concept and presentation are clear, but execution feels a step behind: testing against an abstract simulation rather than real sandbox breakouts and leaving out east-west traffic isolation between concurrent agents leave gaps in practical validation

  2. The framing is the strong thing here: the technology existed, the standard requiring it did not, and nobody outside could check. Evidence generated below the agent's guest VM is the right trust boundary, and the point that an auditor can verify containment without seeing the model or the eval contents removes the main reason a lab would refuse. The Terraform reference config makes this adoptable rather than aspirational. But the "Results" section contains no results — it argues the standard would have stopped the incident, which is reasoning, not evidence.

Cite this project

@misc{dalvi2026verifiable,
  title = {{Verifiable containment for agentic evals}},
  author = {Harys Dalvi},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/verifiable-containment-for-agentic-evals-tddq}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/verifiable-containment-for-agentic-evals-tddq}
}

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