AI Incident Triage Sheet
Last updated: 2026-08-14
When an AI system fails, answer two questions before any investigation. Is data leaving the boundary right now, and if so cut the egress first. Can the system take actions, and if so revoke its credentials before investigating. Containment precedes analysis.
Incident response for AI systems fails when teams begin by diagnosing. An agent with live credentials continues acting while the investigation proceeds, and every minute of analysis is a minute of continued exposure.
The template
When something goes wrong, answer these in order.
- Is data leaving the boundary right now? If yes, cut the egress before anything else.
- Can the system take actions? If yes, revoke its credentials before investigating.
- What is the fallback process, and is it running?
- How many outputs are affected, and can you enumerate the recipients?
- Is the cause input, model, integration, or permission? Investigate in that order, because that is the order of frequency.
- Does this trigger a notification obligation? Start the clock from detection, not from confirmation.
How to use it
- Work the questions in the order given. The order is the artefact; the individual questions are obvious in isolation.
- Cut egress before anything else if data is leaving the boundary, including before establishing what data it is.
- Revoke credentials from any system that can take actions before investigating, because an agent keeps acting during triage.
- Only then establish scope, cause, and notification obligations.
This template comes from the AI Security and Assurance: A Practical Playbook, which sets out the reasoning behind it, the rules of thumb that govern its use, and the signals that tell you the approach is failing. The full playbook is also available as Markdown. See all AI governance templates.