Practical guidance on securing AI agents, tools, and the systems they act on, written by the team building the trust layer for AI agents.
An AI agent should ask for permission when an action is irreversible, exceeds a defined threshold, falls outside its normal pattern, or affects someone besides the requester.
Approval fatigue sets in when agents generate more approval requests than humans can meaningfully review, turning a real control into a reflexive rubber stamp.
A good approval workflow for AI agents blocks the specific action until a qualified person reviews real context, routes correctly, and fails closed if nobody responds.
Human-in-the-loop blocks an AI agent's action until a person approves it; human-on-the-loop lets the action proceed while a person watches and can intervene after.
Step-up authentication requires an extra verification step before an AI agent completes a high-impact action, even when the surrounding session is already authenticated.
Policy-based access control centralizes agent authorization rules in a dedicated engine, so decisions can be updated, tested, and audited without touching agent code.
Attribute-based access control evaluates an agent's permissions against live context, like data sensitivity or time of day, instead of a fixed role assigned in advance.
Role-based access control gives AI agents permission sets tied to predefined roles, which works well for stable, predictable tasks but strains under dynamic ones.
Scoping an agent's permissions means starting from the narrowest set of actions its task requires, then only widening access when a specific, justified need appears.
Delegated authorization lets an AI agent act on a user's behalf using that user's actual permissions, instead of the agent's own, broader service role.
Short-lived credentials cap how long a leaked or misused token stays useful, which matters more for agentic workflows than almost any other part of an AI stack.
A service account for an AI agent needs its own scoped role, credential lifecycle, and monitoring, separate from the human accounts and other agents around it.
