C06 Layer 2 - Runtime Enforcement

Circuit Breakers and Emergency Stop

Manual break-glass stop plus automatic breakers tied to runaway patterns (rate, cost, repetitive signatures, anomalies). Evidence is captured before termination.

Why

Autonomous loops and cascades can produce damage at machine speed.
You need both: manual stop (break-glass)
automatic stop (breakers)

What

A supervisory stop system that: can disable an agent’s ability to perform side effects instantly
detects runaway patterns (retries, loops, cost spikes, abnormal tool mix)
freezes evidence (audit + replay) before termination

How

break-glass = revoke identity + deny policy + cut network route
automated breakers on: tool-call rate, spend velocity, repetitive signatures, anomaly scores
freeze-and-capture: snapshot trace pointers and ledger head before stopping

Evidence

breaker trigger events with cause codes and thresholds
time-to-containment metrics
evidence snapshot pointers produced on stop

Failure modes

stopping UI but leaving backend permissions intact
breaker thresholds not tied to consequence (too high/too low)
termination without capturing replay evidence

NIST AI RMF alignment

C06 maps to MANAGE. See the framework paper for the specific subcontrol mappings.

ISO/IEC alignment

C06 maps to ISO/IEC 27001. Typical evidence: see the Evidence section above.