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Abstract

AI coding agents now read repositories, call tools, and execute shell commands with limited human oversight, and a fast-growing body of work studies whether the execution layer around them is actually safe. That literature is scattered: papers on sandbox isolation, capability and access control, policy enforcement, time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTOU) races, Model Context Protocol (MCP) threats, identity delegation, execution provenance, network egress control, and static analysis of agent-generated code are published independently, rarely cite one another across categories, and no existing survey organizes them by execution-security mechanism. We systematize 39 papers published between 2023 and 2026 into 17 categories, each verified directly against its source rather than taken from a secondary summary; the same verification protocol also confirms four disclosed, patched CVEs directly affecting production agent harnesses, showing the concern is not speculative. Reading across categories surfaces five crosscutting gaps that no single paper addresses: isolation architectures and capability models are evaluated against attacker capability, but almost never against one another on a shared benchmark; policy-enforcement studies report failure rates from 69% to 98% of real denylists yet no isolation paper re-evaluates its own defense under that adversarial setting; TOCTOU and MCP threats are analyzed as separate literatures despite both being instances of the same state-validation problem; every enforcement mechanism we review assumes an honest policy author, leaving policy-authoring error itself unaddressed; and a newly measured failure mode, benign but out-of-scope agent actions occurring at rates up to 17.1% under realistic prompting, is addressed by no access-control or capability paper in our corpus. We also find that three existing broader surveys of agentic AI security discuss sandboxing only as one item among many defenses, leaving execution security without a dedicated systematization; this paper is written to fill that specific gap. We conclude with a research agenda directed at the five gaps rather than at restating the individual papers own stated future work.