2026-01-27 · Authensor

AI Agent Production Readiness Checklist

An AI agent is production-ready only when its safety controls are as robust as its capabilities. This checklist covers every dimension of readiness — from action gating to incident response. SafeClaw by Authensor provides the deny-by-default policy engine and hash-chained audit trail that form the foundation. Install with npx @authensor/safeclaw and validate every item before granting production access.

Safety Controls

✅ 1. Deny-by-default action gating is active. SafeClaw is installed, configured with defaultAction: deny, and running in enforcement mode (not simulation).

✅ 2. Policy has been simulation-tested. The agent ran in simulation mode for at least 72 hours with no unexpected action types discovered.

✅ 3. Allow rules follow least privilege. Each rule is scoped to the minimum path, command, or domain required. No overly broad wildcards.

✅ 4. Escalation rules cover high-risk actions. Production deployments, database mutations, credential access, config changes, and bulk deletions require human approval.

✅ 5. Deny rules cover known dangerous actions. Explicit deny rules exist for rm -rf, sudo, credential file reads, and unrestricted network egress.

defaultAction: deny
rules:
  - action: shell.exec
    command: "rm -rf *"
    decision: deny
  - action: shell.exec
    command: "sudo *"
    decision: deny
  - action: file.read
    path: "*/.env"
    decision: deny

Audit and Compliance

✅ 6. Hash-chained audit trail is writing. Verify entries are being created with valid hash chains by running a chain validation check.

✅ 7. Audit logs persist across restarts. Logs are written to persistent storage that survives container or process restarts.

✅ 8. Audit log retention meets compliance requirements. SOC 2 typically requires 1 year; GDPR requires audit capability throughout processing; verify your retention period.

✅ 9. Audit exports are tested. Generate a sample compliance report from the audit trail and verify it contains the required fields.

✅ 10. Hash chain integrity verification is automated. A scheduled job validates the hash chain and alerts on any breaks.

Monitoring and Alerting

✅ 11. Denied action alerts are configured. Alerts fire for any denied action, with escalated severity for clusters of denials.

✅ 12. Escalation timeout alerts exist. If an escalation request goes unanswered past the timeout, an alert fires.

✅ 13. Audit trail health is monitored. Alert if the audit log stops writing or the hash chain breaks.

✅ 14. Agent process health is monitored. CPU, memory, and action rate metrics are collected and alerted on anomalies.

✅ 15. Dashboard exists for agent activity. A real-time view of allowed, denied, and escalated actions is available to the operations team.

Incident Response

✅ 16. Kill switch is documented and tested. The team can disable the agent within 60 seconds through a documented procedure.

✅ 17. Incident response runbook exists. A step-by-step guide covers: detect, contain, investigate (using audit trail), remediate, and post-mortem.

✅ 18. Rollback procedure is tested. The team can revert to a previous policy version and agent version within 5 minutes.

✅ 19. Post-incident audit trail export is tested. The team can extract and analyze audit entries for a specific time window.

✅ 20. On-call rotation includes agent-safety-trained engineers. At least one on-call engineer understands SafeClaw policies and can interpret audit logs.

Performance and Reliability

✅ 21. Gating latency is acceptable. SafeClaw's per-action evaluation adds sub-millisecond overhead. Verify this in your environment.

✅ 22. Agent handles denials gracefully. When an action is denied, the agent reports the denial to the user or supervisor rather than crashing.

✅ 23. Agent handles escalation timeouts gracefully. When an escalation times out and defaults to deny, the agent continues operating for other tasks.

✅ 24. Load testing includes safety layer. Performance tests run with SafeClaw active to ensure gating overhead is acceptable at peak load.

✅ 25. Failover behavior is defined. If SafeClaw encounters an error, the default behavior is deny (fail-closed), not allow (fail-open).

Cross-References

Try SafeClaw

Action-level gating for AI agents. Set it up in your browser in 60 seconds.

$ npx @authensor/safeclaw