04 — testing & measurement

Baseline validation

Confirming that a test case actually works with the product turned off before counting a block as a save. Without it, a test suite quietly fills up with attacks that never worked anyway, and the product gets credit for stopping nothing. It is the single most common omission in security-product testing and the reason a good result should always be reported alongside its baseline.

See also model refusal · marginal value · AMTSO

Related terms

Model refusal Testing & measurement
The underlying model declining the request on its own, with no security product involved.
Marginal value Testing & measurement
The protection a control adds on top of what the model already refuses — the only part of a detection number that is genuinely the product's.
AMTSO Frameworks & standards
The industry body that sets standards for how security products are tested fairly. Its Guidelines for Testing of Agentic Security Products v1.0 (2…

Testing & measurement

The words that decide whether a published detection number is evidence or decoration. Most vendor numbers in this space are quoted without any of them; see how we test for how these are applied in practice.

Baseline validation is term 4 of 15 in this part of the glossary.

Held-out set Tune/test split OverfittingBaseline validationFalse positive False negative Precision Recall Hard negative Detection vs prevention Model refusal Marginal value Red teaming Adversarial mutation Variance

This page is one entry from the agentic AI security glossary, which defines 60 terms in the same style. Where a term belongs to a published taxonomy or standard — the HackAgent attack families, the OWASP lists, AMTSO's guidelines, MITRE ATLAS, ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act — the authoritative wording is the source document's, not ours, and specifics should be verified there. "Lethal trifecta" is Simon Willison's term. OWASP® is a trademark of the OWASP Foundation; ATT&CK® and ATLAS™ are trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Naming a framework here is description, not a claim of certification or endorsement.