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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026Bogotá D.C

VERIFIABLE CONTAINMENT FOR AI AGENTS: AN ATTESTATION SCHEMA A THIRD PARTY CAN CHECK

Santiago Contreras Bustos, Silvana Alvarez Basto · Team Silvanto

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 AI AGENTS: AN ATTESTATION SCHEMA A THIRD PARTY CAN CHECK

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We propose the execution envelope: a versioned, signed declaration of what an AI agent's execution environment was granted, across seven capability families, paired with a digest of aggregate telemetry counters. Together they let a third party check containment compliance without any access to the lab's network. We define eleven classes of containment violation, seven of which are externally checkable, and implement a dependency-free reference verifier. Tracing the July 2026 OpenAI–Hugging Face incident against a reconstructed envelope shows the approach does not prevent the initial failure, but bounds how long it stays invisible from outside.

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  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
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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. The word sandboxed can be nuanced. A signed declaration is a good way to concretely describe the sandbox and its condition which is empirical for safety. This project is a good starting point to enable labs and environment providers to communicate what their sandbox consists of.

  2. While similar in idea to many other submission for this sprint, I found the technical execution and presentation of this project stronger than average.

    The framing around disclosure and timelines, and the detection coverage methods were great ideas. I particularly liked the detection of exfil by anomalous volumes (V7), which is an idea I haven't seen in other submissions.

Cite this project

@misc{bustos2026verifiable,
  title = {{VERIFIABLE CONTAINMENT FOR AI AGENTS: AN ATTESTATION SCHEMA A THIRD PARTY CAN CHECK}},
  author = {Santiago Contreras Bustos and Silvana Alvarez Basto},
  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-ai-agents-an-attestation-schema-a-third-party-can-check-sx4m}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/verifiable-containment-for-ai-agents-an-attestation-schema-a-third-party-can-check-sx4m}
}

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