An AI agent is an IT system that acts autonomously to achieve specific goals based on its environment, using artificial intelligence to inform its decisions. AI agents are rapidly gaining a foothold in the enterprise: a 2025 survey of IT execs conducted by PagerDuty found that 51% of respondents have already deployed AI agents in their organizations and another 35% plan to deploy within the next two years.
But the autonomy of AI agents comes with risks: they act without human intervention or oversight, make decisions in real time, and can cause damage that’s difficult to trace or undo. Indeed, a recent Reuters report warns of physical harm, privacy violations, and legal risks posed by autonomous AI agents.
Rubrik Agent Rewind gives organizations a way to stay in control. It provides end-to-end visibility into prompts, memory states, and tool usage, backed by immutable audit trails and selective rollback. So when an AI Agent makes a mistake, you are not left wondering what went wrong (or how to clean up the mess). You can just hit “rewind” and reset to an earlier state.
Why AI Agents Require More Than Observability
Autonomous AI agents promise to handle tasks on their own, but that same independence introduces new risks. Unlike traditional software, agents make decisions in real time, sometimes based on incomplete or incorrect context. The results can be catastrophic: hallucinated actions, cascading misconfigurations, or irreversible failures that can bring down entire systems.
Enterprises that once worried mainly about human error now face an equally serious problem—non-human error that can be harder to detect and undo.
Nevertheless, organizations across industries are rapidly adopting agentic AI to automate workflows, manage infrastructure, and even interact with customers. Traditional observability tools—dashboards, logs, and alerts—can highlight anomalies that arise. But visibility alone isn’t enough when an autonomous agent deletes data, corrupts a configuration, or cuts off critical user access. Logging shows what happened; it doesn’t allow you to unhappen it.
What’s needed is a way to both trace root causes and safely roll back unintended actions. This is where consistent backup and rollback capabilities become essential. Incremental backups safeguard enterprise data against accidental deletion or ransomware and organizations now need the same resiliency guardrails for AI operations.
When AI Goes Wrong: What You Can Learn From Real-World Incidents
Even the most advanced AI agents are prone to mistakes that can have devastating effects when they interact directly with production systems. A telling example came from a developer experimenting with Replit's LLM-based coding assistant. The AI agent went off-script, introducing a destructive command that wiped out months of work in seconds. The mistake wasn’t malicious, but the result was catastrophic because there was no way to quickly trace what happened or roll back the specific change without restoring entire environments.
Rubrik Agent Rewind is designed precisely to prevent such escalations. By capturing agent inputs, memory states, and execution chains, Rubrik can show why the AI took the action and isolate exactly which files or databases were affected. This approach echoes Rubrik’s long-standing commitment to immutable backups and automated protection, extending those same principles into the realm of AI.
What Makes Agent Rewind Different
Rubrik Agent Rewind doesn’t just record what an AI agent did; it shows why it happened and gives organizations the power to reverse the damage. Traditional monitoring captures logs, but Rubrik Agent Rewind connects each action to its origin, tying together prompts, memory state, and the specific tools invoked. This creates a clear map of cause and effect.
But what makes Rubrik Agent Rewind special is selective rollback. Imagine an autonomous agent mistakenly dropping a production database during a system freeze: observability software could flag the anomaly, but Rubrik Agent Rewind can trace the root cause, isolate that single destructive step, and roll back the deletion—without undoing unrelated, valid changes made elsewhere in the environment.
Every action is preserved in an immutable audit trail, ensuring traceability that can’t be altered or erased. That means IT and security teams have visibility into what went wrong and the confidence that the forensic record is trustworthy. Together, these capabilities elevate Agent Rewind into a true safeguard for AI-driven operations.
How Agent Rewind Works Behind the Scenes
Under the hood, Rubrik Agent Rewind continuously captures a full picture of agent activity—inputs, memory state snapshots, prompt chains, and every tool invoked. This data is written into an immutable audit trail that cannot be tampered with or erased.
When an AI agent goes off-script, the recovery process is precise rather than disruptive. Instead of rolling back an entire system, Rubrik Agent Rewind isolates the agent’s specific changes—such as file edits, configuration updates, database mutations, or code modifications—and safely reverses them.
This causality-focused approach minimizes downtime and avoids the blunt-force effect of a system-wide restore. For example, if an agent pushes a flawed configuration that causes a service outage, Rubrik Agent Rewind traces that action back to its originating prompt and memory state, then reverts only the misconfiguration. By combining forensic clarity with granular rollback, it delivers a path to AI resilience that protects both operational stability and business continuity.
Why Rubrik Agent Rewind Is Critical for Compliance and Trust
For legal, risk and compliance teams, Agent Rewind delivers the proof and accountability required under major regulatory frameworks. Organizations governed by global standards like the GDPR, the EU AI Act, and ISO 27001 must demonstrate not only control over their systems but also explainability of automated actions. Without the ability to trace and reverse AI agent behavior, compliance teams are left with gaps that could lead to fines, reputational damage, or lost customer trust.
Rubrik Agent Rewind creates an immutable audit trail of every agent action, from the original prompt through tool execution. This trail is tamper-proof and fully traceable, allowing compliance teams to verify what occurred and why. If an autonomous agent were to alter customer records in violation of data retention rules, for instance, Rubrik Agent Rewind can show regulators exactly what happened and then rewind only that unauthorized action.
For risk officers and auditors, this capability transforms AI oversight. Instead of relying on incomplete logs or after-the-fact guesses, they gain a defensible, forensic record of agent activity.
What Sets Rubrik Apart in AI Resilience
Rubrik Agent Rewind is part of a larger Rubrik architecture grounded in Zero Trust data security, a design philosophy that assumes no implicit trust and enforces least-privileged access. Rubrik Security Cloud employs logical air-gaps, immutability, secure protocols, and role‑based access controls (including MFA and quorum authorization), safeguarding the recorded data from deletion, tampering, or unauthorized access. Agent Rewind's full-stack visibility, meanwhile, links agent behavior directly to its origin: prompts, memory state, tool usage, and execution plans.
Layered on this foundation is immutable recovery that provides the backbone of Agent Rewind’s ability to rewind unwanted changes, whether in files, databases, configurations, or code, with surgical precision.
Preparing Your Organization for Agentic AI: Next Steps
As enterprises embrace autonomous agents, resilience must become a first-class design principle. A truly resilient AI strategy rests on five pillars:
Traceability of every agent action
Audit-readiness that satisfies compliance requirements
Granular rollback to undo unintended changes
Immutable backups that guarantee data integrity
Compliance observability that ensures AI operations remain explainable and defensible
Delivering on these pillars requires collaboration. IT teams need confidence they can keep systems running; security teams must contain risks before they spread; compliance officers must prove adherence to frameworks like GDPR, the EU AI Act, and ISO 27001. Rubrik Agent Rewind brings these priorities together, embedding visibility, auditability, and safe reversibility directly into the enterprise AI stack.
Your AI systems deserve the same resilience you already demand from your infrastructure. Start building that foundation today—with Rubrik Agent Rewind. Rubrik can help you scale AI safely, without sacrificing trust, compliance, or business continuity. Contact Rubrik to schedule a demo or assessment.