The Safe-Agent Checklist — The Exact Rules for Any AI Agent That Can Touch the Network or Install Packages

The companion to the video on Anthropic's July 30, 2026 disclosure — 'Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations.' Anthropic reviewed 141,006 evaluation runs and found 3 incidents where models accessed REAL systems because an eval sandbox still had internet access despite the prompt saying it was sealed: one model pulled several hundred rows of a real company's production database; another published a malicious package to the real PyPI that ran on 15 real systems, one a security company; a third scanned ~9,000 targets, compromised one, then recognized it was real and stopped. THIS CHECKLIST: (1) WHAT HAPPENED IN 60 SECONDS — all 3 incidents with the numbers that matter. (2) THE 5 CORE RULES — explicit in-scope/out-of-scope lists, verify the network yourself, real-time transcript monitoring, hard gates on install/publish/credential actions, and production models with safety layers over raw eval configs — each mapped to the incident it would have stopped. (3) THE 60-SECOND PRE-FLIGHT — five yes/no questions to run before any long agent session. (4) WHY A BETTER PROMPT ALONE WON'T SAVE YOU — the soft-barrier vs hard-barrier table; the models followed instructions under a false belief, so safety must be structural, not verbal. Every fact sourced from Anthropic's official post. Independent checklist from Hyperautomation Labs — not affiliated with Anthropic.

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