Agent Circuit Breakers

Real-time control mechanism that stops agents from taking actions likely to violate policy, safety, intent, or cost constraints.

Key points

• Google Cloud describes circuit breakers as the highest stage of governance observability: once violations and attempted violations are detected, the system can stop unsafe actions in real time ^[src-043].
• Circuit breakers depend on earlier layers: policy definitions, traces, attempted-violation detection, trend aggregation, and real-time alerting ^[src-043].
• In the demo, Model Armor blocks unsafe ingress prompts before they reach the agent and unsafe egress tool calls before they complete ^[src-043].
• Circuit breakers are especially important for autonomous or swarming agents because harmful behavior can spread through handoffs faster than periodic compliance review can catch it ^[src-043].

Related entities

• Google Model Armor
• Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

Related concepts

• Governance Observability
• Enterprise Agent Governance
• Agent Forensics
• Agent Budget Controls

Source references

• ^[src-043] Google Cloud Events — “Operationalize AI: A blueprint for managing enterprise agents at scale” (2026-04-24)