Attribution & Accountability Gaps
Accountability & GovernanceDescription
When agents cause harm, accountability is diffuse across developers, operators, orchestrators, and sub-agents. Enables accountability evasion; regulatory compliance challenges in multi-agent pipelines.
Agent causes a regulatory compliance failure; developer, operator, and user each claim the other bears responsibility.
Persistent context or memory poisoning — where injected instructions survive across agent turns or memory stores — has been demonstrated as an extension of prompt injection research in multi-turn and RAG-enabled agent architectures. No confirmed production incident involving durable context manipulation in a deployed agentic financial system has been publicly documented.
Primary mitigations
- Immutable audit trails with human attribution
- clear responsibility assignment policies
- agent decision provenance tracking.
Detection signals
Attribution Clarity Score; human-traceable action rate; audit trail completeness.