AI Safety & Governance

A trusted agent that has not acted in months,
is not a trusted agent today

Trust Decay reduces an agent's trust score over idle periods. An agent that earned auto-rollback autonomy 90 days ago, but has not run a single task since, should not retain that autonomy automatically. Decay nudges idle agents back to lower tiers so an old, possibly stale, agent does not act with high autonomy without recent verified successes.

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app.novaaiops.com / trust-decay
● LIVE
90 day
Half-life on idle
Reversible
Active agents recover
Per-tier
Decay floor
Visible
on Agent Fleet page
How Decay Works

Linear decay, idle-day weighted

Each day an agent does not have a verified action, its trust score drops by a small amount (default 0.4 per idle day). After 30 idle days, that is 12 points off. Active agents can outpace decay easily: every verified remediation adds 1.5 points. The math nudges quiet agents toward suggest mode without ever removing them entirely.

  • ✓
    0.4 per idle day: small enough that a one-week vacation does not ruin a healthy agent
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    1.5 per verified action: one solid week of work refunds two months of decay
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    Tunable per agent class: rare-but-critical agents (e.g., disaster-recovery) get a slower decay rate
app.novaaiops.com / trust-decay · math
Tier Floors

Decay does not erase qualified agents

Each autonomy tier has a trust floor. Decay can demote an agent from auto-rollback to suggest, but it cannot decay an agent below the floor for shadow tier. An agent that earned its place stays on the platform; it just acts less independently when it is quiet.

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    Shadow floor: trust never decays below 30, minimum to keep observing and writing memory
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    Suggest floor: 50, minimum to write runbooks for humans
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    Auto-rollback floor: 70, agents that drop here demote to suggest until they re-earn it
app.novaaiops.com / trust-decay · floors
Recovery

Bring an agent back faster than it decayed

When a decayed agent re-enters service, you can speed up recovery by giving it a deliberate burst of verified work in a low-stakes environment. The page suggests recovery exercises (synthetic incidents in a sandbox) that, when verified, count toward trust at full weight. Most decayed agents return to their previous tier within two weeks.

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    Sandbox exercises: synthetic incidents with verified outcomes that count toward trust without prod risk
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    Faster than decay: +1.5 per verified vs -0.4 per idle, recovery curves are steeper than decay curves by design
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    Two-week typical recovery: measured across customers; faster if you start in shadow tier and graduate
app.novaaiops.com / trust-decay · recovery
Operator Controls

Pause decay for a known reason

Some agents are intentionally idle (only used during disaster recovery, peak season, etc.). For those, operators can pause decay with a documented reason. The pause is time-boxed (default 90 days) and visible on the agent's ledger entry, so a paused agent is not invisible.

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    Time-boxed pause: default 90 days; pause must be renewed explicitly, not silently extended
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    Documented reason: free-text justification stored with the pause; visible on the agent card
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    Auditable: pauses appear in the weekly platform-admin report so they are not forgotten
app.novaaiops.com / trust-decay · pause
Video walkthrough coming soon

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Use it or lose it, by design

Decay is not punishment. It is the platform refusing to let inactivity stand in for trust.

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