Current agentic frameworks assume human oversight will intercept malicious or contradictory instructions, but agents executing autonomously remove this backstop entirely, leaving no enforced input validation, no deterministic controls on elevated operations, and no escalation pathway when an agent's actions contradict its own prior decisions. Multiple disclosed vulnerabilities in a single news cycle illustrate that this is a systemic infrastructure gap, not an isolated implementation flaw. A coordination layer providing runtime-level policy enforcement, instruction provenance verification, and escalation routing could address this at platform scale.

Autonomous agents today have zero enforced guardrails at runtime — no input validation against prompt injection, no escalation when actions contradict policy, and no provenance chain for instructions, leaving every agentic deployment one exploit away from catastrophic misuse.

Engineering teams at companies deploying multi-step autonomous agents in production (fintech, devops, customer service automation) who face compliance, security, or liability exposure from unguarded agent execution.

Every major agentic framework (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen) ships with no runtime policy enforcement — teams are hand-rolling brittle guardrails today; disclosed vulnerabilities (tool-use injection, confused deputy attacks) are creating urgent buyer conversations with CISOs who already budget for API gateways and WAFs.

MVP is a lightweight sidecar/middleware (SDK + proxy) that intercepts agent tool calls, validates instruction provenance against a signed chain, enforces declarative YAML/OPA-style policies (rate limits, permission scoping, action-contradiction detection), and routes escalations to human-in-the-loop or a supervisor agent — deploy in under 10 lines of code wrapping any LLM agent framework.

Subset of the $8B+ API security and runtime application protection market, with the agent-specific segment growing explosively as enterprises move from chatbot demos to autonomous agent deployments — conservatively $500M+ addressable within 3 years.