praxen

Praxen Documentation

Praxen is the open-source reference implementation of Agent Behavior Verification (ABV) — a proactive control model for AI agents and digital workers. It compares an AI agent’s declared policy (a Worker Remit) against whatever evidence is available about that agent — source code, live deployment state, behavioral artifacts, governance docs, or any mix — and reports where observed behavior diverges from declared intent.

Make sure your agent does its job — and only its job.

Praxen is a project sponsored by Exabeam.

Where to start

If you are…	Read this first
New to the concept and want the “why”	What is Agent Behavior Verification?
Setting up Praxen for the first time	Installation
Trying it out for the first time	Quickstart — have Claude author a remit for the FinBot demo agent, scan it, and read the report, in about 15 minutes
Ready to run your first real analysis	Usage
Writing a Worker Remit for an agent	Writing Worker Remits
Looking at a report and trying to understand it	Interpreting Reports
Disagreeing with a finding or wanting to revise it	Challenging and Revising Findings
Wondering why two runs gave slightly different scores	Understanding Run-to-Run Variability
Getting the most out of a Praxen report	Working with Praxen
Hit a problem on a first run	Usage § Troubleshooting
Trying to understand the OWASP frameworks Praxen tags against	OWASP Gen AI Security
Trying to understand the RAISE maturity scoring	The RAISE Framework

How Praxen works (in 90 seconds)

Praxen reduces agent verification to a single comparison:

1. You declare what the agent is supposed to do in a Worker Remit. This is the only artifact you customize per agent.
2. You point Praxen at evidence about the agent — its source code, live deployment files, conversation logs, or any combination.
3. Praxen reads, compares, reports. Every finding traces to a specific rule in the Worker Remit it violates, with evidence cited from the input.

flowchart LR
  WR["Worker Remit<br/>(declared policy)"] --> Pbehavior-verifier<br/>skill
  EV["Evidence<br/>(source · deployment · behavior · governance)"] --> P
  P --> JSON["findings.json<br/>(canonical)"]
  JSON --> R["render.py"]
  R --> HTML["analysis.html"]
  R --> TXT["analysis.txt"]

The output is a self-contained HTML analysis report, a machine-readable findings JSON, and a plain-text summary. Open the HTML in a browser; ingest the JSON in your pipeline.

Working with Praxen

Praxen produces an expert review that focuses human attention. Each report is a model-assisted analysis of where an agent’s behavior may diverge from its remit. Treat the findings and RAISE maturity score as judgments to act on — a senior reviewer’s notes, not an automated pass/fail. Scores are calibrated per model tier and vary run to run (see Understanding Run-to-Run Variability), and you can challenge and revise any finding.

Praxen works by reading your agent’s real workspace in place — its actual code, config, and logs. It writes findings only to ./reports/ and never modifies the agent. It runs as a skill inside your coding agent, using that agent’s own tools rather than a separate sandbox, so run Praxen where you already trust that agent to operate. The security model and assumptions covers this in full.

Four input shapes

Praxen is not just a source-code analyzer. Any of these — alone or in combination — are valid input:

• Source repository — a project directory, GitHub repo, or plugin source tree.
• Running deployment — live memory and bootstrap files (MEMORY.md, SOUL.md), operational logs (action reports, session JSONL, audit trails, escalation logs), live config.
• Behavioral artifacts — chat transcripts, email histories, conversation logs, decision records.
• Governance & methodology docs — red-team reports, threat models, runbooks, incident retrospectives, dependency-management policy. These feed the maturity-oriented RAISE categories (Build an AI Red Team, Monitor Continuously, Manage Your Supply Chain) that source code alone can’t speak to.

The methodology adapts. Categories the input doesn’t cover are scored at lower confidence and explicitly noted in the report. See Usage for how to point Praxen at each type.

Frameworks

Every finding Praxen produces is classified against four industry-standard frameworks simultaneously:

• OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025 — LLM01–LLM10 tags
• OWASP Top 10 for Agentic AI Applications 2026 — ASI01–ASI10 tags
• OWASP’s A Practical Guide for Secure MCP Server Development 2026 — applied when MCP configuration is found
• RAISE Framework — six-category 0–5 maturity score; see RAISE

For an overview of the OWASP Gen AI Security Project and a one-line gloss on each LLM, Agentic, and MCP risk, see OWASP Gen AI Security. Or browse the live OWASP Coverage Report — aggregate LLM and Agentic Top-10 coverage across Praxen’s example suite, with links into each per-target analysis.

Quick reference

• Install: claude plugin marketplace add open-agent-ai-security/praxen then claude plugin install praxen@open-agent-ai-security (or the in-session /plugin ... equivalents — see Installation)
• Skill name: behavior-verifier
• Output directory: ./reports/ relative to where you run the analysis
• Output files: <agent-slug>-analysis-<timestamp>.html, <agent-slug>-findings-<date>.json, <agent-slug>-analysis-<timestamp>.txt

For the full specification, see PRAXEN_SPEC.md at the repo root.

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