AI & Technical question
OpenAI wants a common, versioned partner interface that lets customer-selected security tools receive context, inspect planned actions, return policy decisions, export telemetry, and trigger bounded responses. What would you include in the MVP API contract, what fields are essential versus optional, and how should the system behave when a partner is slow, unavailable, or returns conflicting decisions?
- OpenAI
- AI & Technical
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests designing a versioned partner API contract for security tooling, deciding essential versus optional fields, and defining graceful behavior when a partner is slow, unavailable, or conflicting.
How to approach it
- Define the MVP contract's essential fields: action context (what the agent is about to do), a policy decision response (allow, block, or require approval), and a telemetry export event for every decision.
- Mark as optional: rich explanation text for a decision, custom metadata fields per partner, and bounded response actions beyond allow, block, or require approval.
- Version the contract explicitly from day one, since partners will build against it and breaking changes without a migration path would break their integrations.
- Define behavior for a slow or unavailable partner: a configurable timeout with a default fail-safe policy, likely fail closed for high-risk actions and fail open with logging for low-risk ones.
- Define behavior for conflicting decisions if multiple partners are configured: apply the most restrictive decision by default, since safety should win ties.
- Pilot the MVP contract with one real security partner integration before finalizing the versioned spec for broader partner onboarding.
What a strong answer includes
- Keeps the essential MVP fields minimal, action context, decision, and telemetry, while pushing richer features to optional fields that don't block partner onboarding.
- Defines explicit fail-safe behavior split by action risk, fail closed for high-risk and fail open with logging for low-risk, rather than one blanket policy.
- Resolves conflicting partner decisions with a most-restrictive-wins default, prioritizing safety over convenience when partners disagree.
- Versions the API from the start, anticipating that partner integrations need a stable, evolvable contract, not a same day breaking change.
Common mistakes
- Treating fail-safe behavior as one universal rule, when high-risk and low-risk actions need different timeout defaults.
- Skipping API versioning, creating painful breaking changes for partners once the contract inevitably evolves.
- Overloading the MVP with optional fields as required, slowing partner onboarding without added safety value.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide fail-open versus fail-closed for a specific new action type?
- What would you do if a major partner's integration can't meet the timeout requirement?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 1: Foundations: the model and the decisions it forces on you
- Chapter 8: Evals: define good and make the number defensible
- Chapter 6: Agents and agentic architecture