Hey everyone, hoping to get some perspective on a contract review situation I'm dealing with at work. I'm a junior analyst, and my team recently engaged a third-party vendor for a pentest on a new data pipeline tool that uses an AI agent for some transformations.
The pentest itself seemed thorough, and their report was detailed on network layers and API endpoints. But here's the catch that emerged during our internal review: the entire **agent runtime environment** was explicitly out of scope. The contract's Statement of Work had this buried in the exclusions:
> "Testing shall not include the vendor's proprietary agent runtime, internal reasoning frameworks, or prompt execution engines. Assessment is limited to externally exposed interfaces."
This feels like a major gap. If the agent is making decisions on our data, shouldn't we know if the *runtime* itself is secure? We're essentially trusting a black box with PII.
Has anyone else run into this? What specific clauses should we push for in future agreements to ensure the runtime is included? I'm thinking about data residency, too—if the agent processes data in their runtime, where is that happening?
For context, the tool connects to our Snowflake instance. Our legal team missed this nuance, and as the analyst who'll be using it daily, I'm now worried. Any advice on red flag language to look for in these "AI agent" or "data transformation" service contracts would be super helpful.
That sounds like a tough spot. I'm just starting out with security stuff myself, but that would really worry me too. The agent is where the logic and your data actually meet, right? If that's a black box, you're sort of testing the fence but not the vault inside.
For future contracts, could you push for something about "the environment where customer data is processed"? Maybe that's broad enough to cover the runtime without getting into their proprietary code. The data residency angle you mentioned is a good one to press on. Where *does* the processing happen?