AI engineering glossary · Agents tools MCP
What is kill switch?
Kill switch: A control that lets operators immediately stop an agent or disable a tool if it misbehaves, without waiting for the task to finish. It is a basic safety measure for agents that can act in real systems.
Kill switch: an example
An on-call engineer turns off the payments tool flag, and every agent instantly loses the ability to issue refunds.
Related terms
More Agents tools MCP terms
- LangChain
- LangGraph
- Least privilege for agents
- LlamaIndex
- Long-term memory
- Max iterations
- MCP authorization
- MCP capability negotiation
Where you learn it
Kill switch is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.