Falco

Do You Really Know What Your AI Agent Is Doing in the Sandbox?

The rise of agentic AI systems has exposed critical gaps in observability when agents run inside strong isolation environments. Traditional eBPF-based monitoring on the host kernel fails when agents execute under separate kernels provided by gVisor, Kata, or Firecracker. Experiments with a controlled syscall generator show that visibility depends heavily on filesystem configuration rather than the choice of runtime. Standards such as MCP, OpenTelemetry, and RuntimeClass address parts of the agent lifecycle but leave actual syscall-level reporting undefined. Measurements across multiple configurations reveal that some operations, especially execve, never reach the host regardless of the sandbox used. The findings highlight that security tooling must be re-evaluated after every change in sandbox settings.