Agentic AI Safety: A Structured Review of Open Problems and Their Regulatory Anchoring

Abstract

The shift from passive predictive models to autonomous agents capable of tool use and multi-step planning moves the AI safety landscape from prediction error to control failure: small misjudgements become irreversible actions, and risks compound across long horizons and populations of interacting systems. We present a structured review and taxonomy of open scientific problems in agentic AI safety, mapped explicitly onto the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. The corpus follows a PRISMA-ScR scoping review, assembled through anchor-based citation chaining and curated reading lists across arXiv, the major machine-learning conferences, and selected security and fairness venues, with a primary March 2026 search cut-off (extended to May 2026 during revision for a small number of high-relevance governance and agentic-safety sources), explicit eligibility criteria, and an analytical distinction between open scientific problems and deployment risks. The taxonomy identifies eight problem families spanning reinforcement-learning policies and language-model planners: goal specification, inner alignment, safe learning and robustness, scalable oversight, interpretability, tool-use security, multi-agent safety, and evaluation and assurance. Mapping these onto the two frameworks shows close alignment for some families and notable absences for others, with multi-agent safety surfacing as a regulatory gap. We add a per-family research roadmap with concrete milestones and a practitioner-facing deployment-posture triage, arguing that progress on inner alignment, interpretability for deceptive-alignment detection, and multi-agent safety would most directly reduce compliance uncertainty.