Research

Control failures. Examined closely.

Published research on agentic AI control failure, behavioral governance, and the gaps that compliance reviews miss — research notes, analyses, research briefs and working papers.

Library Published research

Author

Aljona Schwan

Founder · AI Resilience Lab · Zürich

Research on agentic AI governance, model risk, and the structural control failures that emerge when autonomous systems operate without adequate behavioral oversight. Grounded in primary sources, regulatory frameworks, and fifteen years of investigative practice — not vendor positioning.

Working Paper · Forthcoming
AI Agent Fraud

The exploitation of agentic AI systems to produce unauthorized outcomes — a risk category existing fraud frameworks were not built to address. In development.

Field Note
Nine Months, 87 Cases: What a Real Four-Eyes Failure Looked Like

A real enterprise case shows how individually authorised agent actions, each correct on its own platform, combined into 87 instances of commission exceeding deal margin — and why no segregation-of-duty control caught it.

Analysis
Permission Boundary, Behavioural Audit: Your Stack Has Both. Only One Is Verified.

Most agentic AI governance programmes have built strong permission controls and treated the audit layer as a logging checkbox. The two require entirely different kinds of control.

Research Note
What Your Agent Remembers — and Who Governs That.

AI agents accumulate memory across sessions — and that memory changes how they behave over time. Most governance programs have not drawn the boundary around it.

Analysis
The Verification Layer

Why agentic systems need a layer that verifies what an agent did against what it was authorized to do — and what happens when that layer is missing.

Analysis
The Mythos Reckoning: Why the 20-Year Security Equilibrium Just Collapsed.

Autonomous vulnerability research has arrived. What a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug and a lunchtime email tell us about the structural limits of human-speed defense.

Research Brief
Agent Intervention Taxonomy

A governance framework for organisations deploying autonomous AI agents in production — structured across five intervention pillars with implementation prioritisation for Risk, Control, and Board-level oversight.

Analysis
The AI vulnerability your governance program has not planned for.

Prompt injection is an integrity failure that no security product can currently solve as a class. What this means for every organisation deploying AI agents under FINMA, EU AI Act, and GDPR.

Research Note
The monitoring gap NIST cannot close.

NIST AI 800-4 documents deceptive AI behavior as an unsolved security monitoring problem. Pre-deployment evaluations exist — but face a structural ceiling. What this means for agentic deployments in regulated industries.

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