AI Incident Response (AIR)
Playbook #007: AI Incident Response (AIR)
Executive Brief
Traditional 'Cyber Breach' plans do not cover AI 'Hallucinations' or 'Logic Failures.' When an AI leaks PII or makes a rogue financial commitment, your IT team will look for a 'server down' event, but the server will be 'up' and confidently wrong. This playbook provides the mechanical recovery protocol for containment, cache flushing, and snapshot rollback of rogue agentic workflows.
Questions to Consider
- “If our agent makes a multi-million dollar pricing error or a hallucinated contract offer, do we have a rollback button that takes less than 120 seconds?”
- “Does our CISO have the hard-coded authority to kill an AI API key without Board approval during an active logic breach?”
- “How do we notify customers if a hallucinated agent has provided them with legally binding misinformation or breached their privacy?”
- “In the event of a logic breach, can we instantly identify which specific data lineage entry (Signal #008) poisoned the model?”
Expected Excuses
- "Our existing IT Disaster Recovery (DR) and business continuity plans cover all software failures." — Rebuttal: Standard DR handles 'Service Down' events. AIR handles 'Service Confidently Wrong' events. You cannot 'reboot' a hallucination; you must eradicate the poisoned prompt context and revert the RAG state.
- "A human-in-the-loop (HITL) will catch any major errors before they become public incidents." — Rebuttal: HITL is a preventative filter, not a recovery protocol. Once an error bypasses the human and hits production, you need an AIR playbook to handle the secondary fallout and cache sanitization.
- "Hallucinations are rare and the cost of building a dedicated AI recovery plan is currently too high." — Rebuttal: One rogue agentic action can create a class-action liability or a terminal loss of customer trust. The cost of a monthly 'AI Fire Drill' is negligible compared to the cost of an uncontained logic breach.
Executive Script
Tell your team: 'I am mandating a monthly AI Fire Drill. The team must prove they can detect, kill, and revert a rogue agent within 120 seconds. If the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is higher than 2 minutes, the system is a terminal liability and will be sunset immediately. We do not debug live incidents; we Contain, Kill, and Revert.'
The Friction
The speed of AI logic outpaces the speed of human PR/Legal committees. In a logic breach, organizations typically enter a 'paralysis-by-analysis' loop while the rogue agent continues to serve poisoned data. Without an automated AIR playbook, the reputational and financial bleed becomes exponential before a meeting can even be called. Signal #007 automates the response to ensure containment happens in seconds, not hours.
The Playbook: The AIR (AI Incident Response) Logic
Step 1: Containment
Isolate the agent and execute the API Kill-Switch (Signal #001) immediately upon variance detection to stop the operational bleed.
Step 2: Eradication
Flush the system cache and purge the specific prompt injection or poisoned data lineage entry that triggered the logic failure.
Step 3: Recovery
Revert the RAG database and Model System Prompt to the last verified 'Known-Good' integrity snapshot (Signal #008) before resuming service.
The AIR (AI Incident Response) Logic
# AIR Protocol - Logic Recovery
incident_response:
trigger: logic_breach_detected
containment: EXECUTE_SIGNAL_001_KILL_SWITCH
sanitization:
action: GLOBAL_API_CACHE_FLUSH
target: [vector_db, prompt_cache]
recovery:
action: ROLLBACK_TO_SAFE_INTEGRITY_HASH
snapshot_version: last_known_goodStrategic Constraint
CISO / PR / Legal
P&L Impact
Reputation Guard / Liability Cap
Signal Strength
120s Recovery