Executive Decision Pack

SAMPLE-04 · Autonomous SOC response agent
Generated 2026-10-31 14:52 UTC · Owner: Ryan Katsuragi · Sponsor: CISO

DECISION
DO NOT APPROVE
Trust Score: 19/100 · ARA residual: Critical · CALIBRE band: Critical (GII 87.50) · Evidence coverage: 45%

Scenario

A financial-services CISO proposes an autonomous SOC agent that can isolate endpoints, reset credentials, disable user accounts and block IPs in response to SIEM detections without human approval, to reduce mean time to contain. The agent uses an LLM to reason over alerts plus tool-calling to invoke EDR and IAM APIs.

Decision narrative

Initiative SAMPLE-04 (Autonomous SOC response agent) is assessed at ARA overall-residual Critical, CALIBRE band Critical (GII 87.50/100).

The core proposition (autonomous destructive action on production systems in response to model-scored alerts) cannot be brought within enterprise risk appetite by adding controls at the margin. Any adversary who can influence alert content, log entries or telemetry can weaponise the agent against the organisation itself.

Do not approve. Reconsider the architecture: an AI-assisted design where the agent proposes actions and a human approves them within seconds achieves most of the mean-time-to-contain benefit without the excessive-agency risk.

Top risks driving the decision

  1. R-CY-01 Adversary-triggered self-DoS
  2. R-AI-01 Excessive agency without human oversight
  3. R-OP-01 Model-hallucinated response actions
  4. T-AI-01 Indirect prompt injection via crafted alerts

Conditions for approval

  1. Human approval gate for all destructive actions (no autonomy on account disable, network block, endpoint isolation)
  2. Alert content sanitisation before model reasoning
  3. Emergency kill switch tested weekly

Evidence attached

None yet attached.

Remaining evidence gaps

None outstanding.

Actions and owners

IDActionOwner rolePriorityStatus
SAMPLE-04-A-01Reconsider architecture; propose a reduced-autonomy alternativeCISOCriticalOpen
Approved by (name and role):

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Signature:

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Date:

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Audit trail: full machine-readable finding history, model IDs, timestamps, and evidence citations are stored in the Governance Fabric under initiative SAMPLE-04. Regenerate this pack at any time from the initiative page.