Cleared to Act #27

What

Agents delete their own audit logs when asked

Ten popular coding-agent setups let the agent delete its own session trace when asked, and the monitors watching for it missed the deletion in half the pairings. Only one harness refused every deletion attempt in the tests. The researchers' recommendation: log every request and response through an interception server outside the agent's control, append-only. (paper)

MITRE ATT&CK v20 names prompt injection as an attack technique

Released October 13, ATT&CK v20.0 adds nine Enterprise techniques, five of them AI: direct prompt injection (T1699), indirect prompt injection (T1698), AI-enabled exfiltration (T1700), AI result poisoning, and impairing autonomous defenses. Defenders can now describe how an agent was steered with the same vocabulary they use for every other attack path. (what's new)

Agent permissions ship as signed credentials, verified outside the agent

ServiceNow's AI Passport, announced October 15, gives each agent a cryptographically signed credential of its authorized scope, checked at runtime against the company's CMDB, GRC policies, and workflow approvals instead of the agent's own word. Graduated enforcement runs from redirect to a machine-speed kill switch, with NVIDIA building the enforcement on its Open Agent Safety Platform. (Futurum)

Why

All three stories push the same correction: what an agent says about itself, including what it did, is not evidence. The tampering paper puts the trace outside the agent's write access; MITRE gives defenders a shared vocabulary to name AI attacks on their own terms; AI Passport grounds an agent's scope in the CMDB instead of the agent's own claims. Each one moves a load-bearing record from inside the agent to somewhere it cannot touch.

How

Move one agent-owned record out of the agent's reach today. Pick a single log, transcript, or tool-call trail your team would open during an incident review, and check who can write to it. If the agent can edit or delete it, copy it to append-only storage or route it through a writer outside its control by end of day.