AgentTrust: A Self-Improving Trust Layer for AI-Agent Actions

Abstract

AI agents increasingly take consequential actions -- shell commands, cloud operations, and arbitrary tool-calls -- so a trust layer must decide, per action, whether to allow, warn, block, or escalate. We argue that the right way to reason about such a layer is by threat type. Lexical (fixed-signature) threats, where danger lives in a stable token, are decidable by deterministic rules; semantic (intent-dependent) threats, where a benign and a malicious action share the same surface, are out of reach for rules by construction. We make this concrete with a negative proof: a determined, hand-authored cloud rule pack lifts held-out accuracy only 48 to 56% overall and moves the semantic categories by 0pp (data_db 29 to 29, observability 59 to 59, supply_chain 50 to 50), while a strong LLM judge carries exactly those categories. We give the judge a self-learning capability: on a corpus that is mainly semantic attacks it nearly doubles rule accuracy (48% to 83.6-85.2%) with near-zero false-blocks, and this holds across two model providers. We turn this into a self-improving dual-store system: the judge distills a growing deterministic rule floor on lexical threats (cheaper over time) and feeds a guarded RAG memory on semantic threats (a verdict-cache fails -- surface-twins collapse to ~58% -- so a corroboration guard lifts semantic accuracy +13pp, 70 to 84). The result is what sets AgentTrust v2 apart from its static v1 predecessor: a trust layer that self-evolves from its own stream of decisions -- cheaper on the lexical class (it distils its own rules) and smarter on the semantic class (it accrues guarded precedent), while never hard-blocking a benign action. An end-to-end online replay shows the judge-call rate falling (50% to 44%) and judge-domain accuracy rising (71% to 80%), with 0 benign hard-blocks across 45,000 actions.