Methodology
What is AI behavioral governance?
AI behavioral governance is the discipline of governing AI agent behavior in production — identifying, classifying, and remediating behavioral failure modes through a continuous operational lifecycle.
It is distinct from AI governance, which governs the humans and structures responsible for AI (board oversight, compliance programs, ethics reviews). AI behavioral governance governs the agents themselves: what they do, how they fail, and how those failures are detected, classified, and prevented.
The behavioral pattern taxonomy on this site is the classification system for that discipline. Every incident in the database is classified against the taxonomy. Every governance recommendation traces back to a documented failure mode.
Classification methodology
Incidents are classified against a taxonomy of eight behavioral failure patterns (BP-001 through BP-008), each derived from observed failures in production AI agent systems. The classification process follows these principles:
- Each incident is assigned a primary pattern — the dominant failure mode exhibited
- Secondary patterns are assigned when additional failure modes are present
- Severity is assessed based on the impact and detectability of the failure
- Incidents that cannot be tied to a specific public source are labeled as illustrative cases
The full governance framework, including the pattern taxonomy specification, detection guidance, and governance countermeasures, is published at aiagentgovernance.org under CC BY 4.0.
Data sourcing and attribution
Externally-sourced incidents in this database link to the originating public record wherever available.
Incident data sourced from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai) is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The behavioral pattern reclassification layer is original analysis by agentgovernance.org.
The original case studies in this database were documented by the agentgovernance.org research team based on direct observation of AI agent behavioral patterns in governed production deployments. They are not derived from single external public reports.