Agent Guardrails

An agent that can take actions is far riskier than one that only talks, so guardrails must constrain actions, not just text. The core controls are least privilege (scoped tools/credentials), validating every tool call, human approval for irreversible/high-impact actions, bounded iterations and budget, and sandboxed execution. The mindset is to assume the agent can be wrong or hijacked (prompt injection) and design so the worst case is contained. Applied-AI interviews probe it because deploying agents safely is the hard part of agentic AI.