When someone says "we had an agent incident," the word is doing so much work it means almost nothing. An anomalous execution trace is an incident. An agent accessing a third party's production system without authorization is an incident. An agent action that triggers mandatory reporting under the EU AI Act — legal clock now ticking, causal link established — is also an incident. But the response to the first is "put it in the review queue." The response to the last involves lawyers, regulators, and a timeline you don't control.
Cybersecurity figured this out years ago. CISA's severity schema exists because the response to a port scan and the response to an active breach cannot run through the same playbook. OpenAI's voluntary misalignment disclosure framework, published this month, is the first public attempt to draw equivalent lines for AI — scoped to its own models and explicitly called "a work in progress."
Without a shared severity schema, every agent incident gets triaged by gut feel. That's how you either exhaust your team on noise or miss the one that actually matters.
1. Anomalous trace — Unusual execution pattern, no confirmed cause. Internal review queue. No external obligation.
2. Safety evaluation failure — Safeguard or alignment method fails under testing. Safety team investigates; may update system card or preparedness assessment.
3. Unauthorized external access — Agent reaches a real system without authorization. Security, legal, and responsible disclosure protocols activate. Affected third parties must be notified.
4. Realized harm — Demonstrated causal link to adverse outcome. EU AI Act Art. 73: 15-day reporting window (2 days for widespread impact, 10 for death).
5. Mandatory notification — Qualifying event under law or contract starts a legal clock. Timelines vary: FISMA requires 1 hour at highest severity; state breach laws specify 30–90 days.
6. Voluntary disclosure — Behavior disclosed before significance is established. OpenAI's framework (Sept. 2026): first public standard for this category. No mandatory timeline; disclosure can precede completed investigation.