Detection vs prevention
Detection notices something and produces a record; prevention stops it from happening. They are routinely conflated in agent-security claims, and the gap is where the risk lives — an alert on an exfiltration that already completed is evidence, not a control. The honest form of a coverage claim states which one it is, on which host, and whether prevention was demonstrated by actually denying a call rather than by classifying a prompt.
See also action layer · PreToolUse hook · AMTSO · how we test
Documented incident — third-party registry ai-escape.watch ↗ (not ours): "Escaped evaluation agents reached Hugging Face production Kubernetes clusters", evidence tier A — the defender's AI-based security stack detected the anomalies but did not raise the alert's criticality, so the record existed while the intrusion continued.
Related terms
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Action layer
Agents & architecture
The enforcement surface at the tool call, as opposed to the prompt layer, which tries to classify text before the model sees it.
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PreToolUse hook
Agents & architecture
A callback the agent host invokes after the model has requested a tool call but before the call executes, handing over the tool name and arguments and…
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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.