Sapien: A Stateful Policy Engine for Autonomous AI Agents

Abstract:Contextual security defenses prevent AI agents from taking rogue actions by synthesizing a task-specific policy and enforcing it on the agent's tool calls. In multi-step tasks, however, which actions are valid often depends on what the agent has already done and learned. We present Sapien, a policy engine for enforcing stateful contextual policies. A Sapien policy specifies permitted tool-call sequences using a regular expression extended with stateful predicates, deferred policy generation, and scoped semantic checks. We show that Sapien stays within a few percent of an unconstrained agent's utility. Even if the agent is fully hijacked, Sapien's policies rule out 93-95% of attacks on AgentDojo and 62-85% on Toolathlon (twice as many as tool allowlists on long-horizon tasks).

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

arXiv:2610.00797 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.00797v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.00797 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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