MTTD-for-Agents
Also known as: Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) for Agents, Mean Time To Detect for Agents, MTTD-A
A leading indicator for enterprise agent-mode safety, adapted from SRE MTTD to cover cross-agent delegation and emergent behaviour. Targets: < 4h for high-risk agents at large enterprises, < 24h at mid-market.
Three components: a 14-day baseline behaviour profile per agent, a fixed tripwire-metric set (tool-use frequency anomaly, output length Z-score, cross-agent delegation rate, refusal rate), and a five-stage detection chain (tripwire → alert → triage → contain → postmortem). The free tripwire-config YAML template is the lead magnet.
Etymology
Adapted by Peter Walda from SRE Mean-Time-To-Detect for the agentic-AI failure surface. First published 2026 as the agentic safety counterpart to GAUGE's governance scoring.
Related frameworks
Articles that analyse this term
Primary sources
- Agent Mode AI. MTTD-for-Agents framework paper
- Agent Mode AI. MTTD methodology amendments log