Your Kill Switch May Not Stop Your Agent

The operator stops a procurement agent. Its chat freezes, the worker disappears, and the dashboard turns gray. Twenty seconds later, a supplier confirms a purchase order.

That sequence is possible without a rogue model, a jailbreak or a broken stop button. The supplier may have accepted the order before the operator acted. A delayed retry may belong to a different worker. A child task may hold its own credentials. Stopping the component you can see does not establish what happened beyond it.

A useful AI agent kill switch needs a precise promise: which new actions it prevents, where that prevention takes effect, and how the team accounts for work already dispatched. The following design uses a hypothetical procurement assistant to build that promise into a revocation timeline and an action inventory. The timings and operation identifiers are illustrative; they describe no production incident.

Give the stop button a bounded promise

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