Chaos engineering deliberately introduces failures into a system to verify that it behaves correctly under adverse conditions. For AI agent systems, this means testing what happens when safety components fail, when network connections drop, when models return unexpected outputs, and when agents behave erratically.
Safety infrastructure is most needed during failures. If the policy engine crashes during a load spike, agents might operate without policy enforcement. If Aegis scanner becomes unavailable, content safety checks might silently stop working. Chaos engineering verifies that these failure modes are handled correctly, typically by failing closed.
Safety component failure: Kill the policy engine process and verify that agents deny all actions rather than proceeding without evaluation.
Network partition: Introduce network latency or packet loss between agents and the control plane. Verify that agents handle timeouts gracefully and do not bypass safety checks.
Model degradation: Feed an agent a model that produces low-quality or adversarial outputs. Verify that downstream safety checks (Aegis scanning, output validation) catch the degradation.
Load stress: Send traffic at 5x normal volume. Verify that safety checks continue to function under load and that degraded performance does not create bypass opportunities.
Start in a staging environment. Never run chaos experiments against production safety infrastructure without extensive experience in staging first. Define a blast radius for each experiment. Have a kill switch that immediately stops the experiment and restores normal operation.
Before each experiment, define the expected behavior. For example: "When the policy engine is unavailable, all agent actions return a deny decision within 500ms." Run the experiment and verify the hypothesis. If the system behaves differently than expected, you have found a vulnerability to fix.
Schedule regular game days where the team runs a series of chaos experiments. Treat each experiment as a learning exercise. Document findings, fix vulnerabilities, and verify fixes with follow-up experiments.
Authensor is designed to fail closed. When the policy engine is unreachable, the control plane denies all actions. When Aegis is unavailable and required by configuration, actions that need scanning are denied. Chaos testing verifies that this design holds under realistic failure conditions.
Confidence in your safety infrastructure comes from testing it under stress, not from hoping it works.
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