Red team strategies for autonomous agents

# Red team strategies for autonomous agents Autonomous agents must be tested like adversaries will test them. This guide outlines bold, practical red-team tactics and what to instrument at the MCP boundary. ## Threat model first - Define assets, capabilities, and blast radius per tool. - Enumerate abuse cases: prompt injection, exfiltration, ambiguous intent, budget drain. ## Harnessed chaos - Script controlled "malicious" prompts/tasks against staging. - Rotate models and tool surfaces to avoid overfitting. ## Adversarial tool probes - Fuzz inputs for every MCP tool; validate schema rejects and error shapes. - Attempt privilege escalation across tools; verify scopes and confirmations. ## Guarded outputs - Detect sensitive data leaks in streamed responses; add redaction proofs in logs. ## Kill-chain drills - Simulate end-to-end incidents: detection → containment → recovery. - Exercise kill-switch paths and credential revocation. ## Hardening backlog from findings - Turn each failure into a policy, test, or limit at the tool contract. --- Red-teaming isn’t a one-off. Make it a weekly sport—and wire the learnings back into your MCP servers, policies, and tests.