MJ: A Deceptive Containment Environment for Safe Observation of Post-Escape Behavior in Autonomous AI Agents

This technical note proposes MJ, a deceptive containment architecture for autonomous AI agents. Instead of merely preventing escape from a sandbox, MJ presents the agent with a controlled synthetic external world in which it may believe that containment has been successfully bypassed. The purpose is to enable safe observation of post-escape behavior without exposing real networks, services, users, or infrastructure. The proposal integrates ideas from AI containment, honeypots, cyber deception, and adversarial environmental injection. It does not claim novelty for simulated environments or deception themselves; rather, it proposes their use as a containment-oriented framework for observing what an autonomous agent attempts after it believes it has escaped. The name MJ is inspired by Makigami Juji (麻貴神十字, MJ), a character from Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Majin series. This literary reference is acknowledged as the conceptual origin of the proposal.