# Stop Shipping AI Agents on Faith: Capability Is Not Production Readiness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27677 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27677/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07858/) (2022)
- [ProofAgent Harness: Open Infrastructure for Adversarial Evaluation of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24134/) (2026)
- [Human-on-the-Bridge: Scalable Evaluation for AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16871/) (2026)
- [AI Agents Do Not Fail Alone:The Context Fails First](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14275/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI agents are moving into production workflows where they retrieve information, call tools, maintain state, and act on behalf of users or organizations, but many release decisions still rely on capability signals, demos, or behavioral tests that do not show whether an agent is ready to operate under production constraints. Capability is therefore not production readiness. This paper introduces the ProofAgent Index (PAI), a governance readiness index for AI agents. PAI combines four dimensions of deployment evidence: Evaluation, Context, Compliance, and Governance. Evaluation measures observed behavior, Context measures the operating environment that shapes that behavior, Compliance measures alignment with applicable rules and controls, and Governance measures whether the organization can authorize, monitor, audit, and control the agent during operation. PAI is implemented inside ProofAgent Harness, an open source infrastructure for auditable AI agent evaluation and governance. Validation across two heavily regulated domains, healthcare and finance, shows that PAI carries held out readiness signal and separates higher risk from lower risk configurations. The results show that context engineering strongly changes reliability, capability improves behavior but does not determine readiness, and governance evidence must remain visible rather than averaged away. PAI reframes agent release from a faith based deployment decision into an auditable readiness decision.