Practical Guide to Building Enterprise-Grade AI Agents That Pass Security Audits

A comprehensive field guide has been published for engineers building AI agents intended for production use in companies ranging from small startups to large enterprises. The guide draws on lessons from over ten real-world production agents and incorporates engineering guidance from Anthropic and OpenAI. It covers the full lifecycle — from deciding whether to build, through architecture and reliability engineering, to security, compliance, and multi-tenancy requirements. A central argument of the guide is that roughly 80% of production quality comes from the agent's surrounding harness — including prompts, tools, memory, and observability — rather than the underlying model. The guide also stresses that enterprise readiness requires building security, governance, and auditability from day one, not as an afterthought.