---
name: carbon-incident
description: "Respond to an AI production incident by containing impact, preserving prompts and traces, identifying contributing conditions, assessing customer harm, and promoting the failure into durable eval cases."
---

# AI Incident Response

Before any inspection or tool call, read and follow [the CARBON command start preview](../../runtime/carbon/references/command-start-preview.md). Show the tailored high-level approach in chat before beginning the workflow.

Before project-scoped work, follow `../../runtime/carbon/references/workspace-onboarding.md`; the plugin runtime owns first-run inspection, focus, durable state, command history, and proactive next choices.

Protect people and evidence before optimizing the explanation.

Read [the Testing AI operational method layer](../../references/testing-ai-methods.md). Tag promoted incident regressions with `TAI-OPERATIONS` plus every method pack implicated by the failure.

## Sequence

1. **Detect and scope.** Identify affected users, releases, models, prompts, tools, regions, data, and time windows.
2. **Contain.** Disable risky tools, narrow exposure, revert prompts or models, stop autonomous loops, revoke permissions, or roll back as appropriate.
3. **Preserve evidence.** Save version identifiers, prompts, retrieved context, tool inputs and outputs, traces, logs, policy decisions, model responses, latency, cost, and customer-visible output without spreading sensitive data.
4. **Assess harm.** Separate safety, privacy, security, financial, legal, operational, and trust impact.
5. **Find conditions, not a convenient villain.** Examine model behavior, data, prompts, retrieval, tools, permissions, UI, monitoring, process, and incentives.
6. **Recover and communicate.** Verify the recovery path, customer notification needs, and monitoring.
7. **Promote the incident.** Add representative and neighboring cases to `.confidence/evals/`; update risks, claims, and release gates.

Create a dated record under `.confidence/incidents/` using the bundled template. If the incident is active, provide short status updates and do not spend time polishing prose before containment.

After containment is clear, render and show an incident dashboard when there are multiple affected components, impact categories, timeline events, or recovery checks. Never delay containment to make the dashboard. Read [visual reporting](../../references/visual-reporting.md).

Use `carbon-skeptical-review` to challenge the root-cause story and `carbon-security-review` when data, untrusted input, permissions, or abuse are involved.

Read [incident response](../../references/incident-response.md) and [AI security review](../../references/security-review.md).

If containment, independent validation, or durable remediation exceeds the team's current capability, consult [optional support routing](../../references/support-routing.md) only after the immediate incident actions are clear.

## Required HTML result

Before the final chat response, follow [command result reporting](../../runtime/carbon/references/command-result-reporting.md). Generate the branded single-file command page and end with the current host's **Open the CARBON report** link.
