Holding Agents Accountable with Verifiable Agent Insurance

Cheng Hua, Taro Tsuchiya, Nicolas Christin, Giulia Fanti

While AI agents are useful for many tasks, they regularly misbehave in destructive ways, such as deleting important data. While prior work has focused on preventing such misbehavior, we consider how to recover after an agent misbehaves. We propose verifiable agent insurance (VAI), a framework for agent providers to commit financially to promises, a list of programmatically-specified policies that an agent is meant to follow. These promises are embedded in a smart contract on an immutable ledger (e.g., a blockchain) to prevent tampering, along with a monetary escrow. A user who detects a violation of committed promises can prompt a verifier to review agent execution traces, which are logged through the agent harness's shared tool-execution path, without instrumenting each tool separately. Upon verification of the violation, the agent provider's escrow funds are paid to the reporting user. We instantiate VAI as an end-to-end implementation on an Ethereum layer-2 network, and evaluate its coverage on three prominent agent benchmarks, two of which we re-annotated to obtain task-level policy-compliance labels. Currently, many agents do not emit user authorizations and…