What it means
An incident response plan is a step-by-step guide used when an autonomous AI agent behaves unexpectedly or causes unintended harm in a live environment. Because these agents can make their own decisions without constant human supervision, they can sometimes perform actions that violate safety rules or business logic. The plan provides clear instructions on how to detect these errors, how to quickly stop the agent (such as by revoking its access or turning it off), how to investigate the cause, and how to restore normal operations. Having a plan ensures that human teams can react quickly and predictably to minimize damage when an AI goes off track.
Why it matters for governance
It replaces panic with a rehearsed sequence of detect, stop, investigate, and recover so teams contain AI incidents before damage compounds.
Example
A pricing agent starts doubling prices on customer invoices; the response plan kicks in: monitoring flags the anomaly, the agent's write access is revoked, engineers trace the bad configuration, and service is restored with a guardrail added.