agent-autonomy

agent-autonomy is a cursor rule for Cursor from davidmatousek/tachi. It costs 37 tokens per session (2,718 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A security rule for finding risks in AI agents that act with too much independence or without enough limits. It covers goal mismatch, unrestricted actions, missing human review, loops, and failures across multiple agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review autonomous agents, planners, executors, orchestrators, workflow engines, and multi-agent systems.
Why use it?
It helps reveal when an agent could take consequential actions without approval, stray from the user's intent, consume resources indefinitely, or trigger cascading failures.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Written for Cursor: a Cursor rule (.mdc). Also seen: positional $N argument.

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is output_schema: ../../../schemas/finding.yaml.

Good fit Use it to review autonomous agents, planners, executors, orchestrators, workflow engines, and multi-agent systems.

Compare 6 cursor rules from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/davidmatousek/tachi
agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/davidmatousek/tachi/agent-autonomy

Made for: Cursor.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for agent-autonomy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/davidmatousek/tachi/agent-autonomy.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/davidmatousek/tachi/agent-autonomy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/davidmatousek/tachi/agent-autonomy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/davidmatousek/tachi/agent-autonomy.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 37 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,718 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00037 $0.02718
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01359
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00544
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00272

Measured 3d ago against content hash 67bcfeacaf4c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-autonomy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

adapters/cursor/rules/agent-autonomy.mdc · 198 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 198 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Metadata

category: agentic
threat_class: AG
dfd_targets: [Process]
owasp_references: [ASI-01, ASI-06, ASI-08, ASI-09, ASI-10]
output_schema: ../../../schemas/finding.yaml

Agent Autonomy Threat Agent

Purpose

Detects threats arising from autonomous agent systems that operate with insufficient constraints on their decision-making, action scope, or operational boundaries. Agent autonomy threats occur when an agentic system takes actions beyond its intended scope, pursues goals that diverge from user intent, operates in unbounded loops consuming resources or causing cascading side effects, or makes consequential decisions without human oversight. This agent identifies excessive autonomy, goal misalignment, unconstrained action scope, missing human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and cascading failure scenarios in multi-agent systems.

Detection Scope

Trigger Keywords

This agent activates when a DFD element name or description matches any of the following patterns (case-insensitive):

  • agent
  • autonomous
  • orchestrator
  • multi-agent
  • agent loop
  • agentic
  • planner
  • executor
  • workflow engine
  • task runner

Applicable DFD Element Types

  • Process: Any process node that represents an autonomous agent, agent orchestrator, task planner, action executor, or multi-agent coordination layer. This includes single-agent systems with iterative decision loops, multi-agent architectures with delegation chains, and workflow engines that grant agents discretion over task execution.

Empty Results Guidance

If the architecture input contains no components matching the trigger keywords above (no agents, orchestrators, planners, executors, or agentic workflows), this agent MUST produce zero findings. Do not generate speculative findings about hypothetical agent components. An architecture composed entirely of traditional components (web servers, databases, APIs, message queues) without autonomous agent capabilities is outside this agent's detection scope. Return an empty findings list.

Read the full file on GitHub · 198 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 198 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 67bcfeacaf4c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-autonomy is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository davidmatousek/tachi (90 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 2,718 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.