Blast Radius Containment

Blast radius containment is the practice of designing agent systems so that any single failure, error, or security compromise affects the smallest possible scope, using strategies like filesystem scoping to restrict agents to specific directories, network isolation to limit which endpoints they can reach, transaction boundaries to make destructive operations reversible, and resource limits to cap tokens and compute per task. The concept comes from infrastructure engineering, where blast radius describes failure domains, and it applies directly to agentic systems because agents are non-deterministic by nature: you cannot prevent all failures, but you can constrain what any single failure can touch. The most dangerous agent failures are not the ones that crash visibly but the ones that silently corrupt data or make unintended changes that surface hours later, so containment is about limiting the scope of the worst-case outcome, not just preventing the average one.