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Before connecting an AI agent to approval or other governance workflows, give it a distinct, accountable identity; limit it to the exact tools, operations, data, and resources its task needs; and make an independent system—not the model—enforce permissions and approvals. Require meaningful human approval for high-impact actions, decide what happens when controls fail, and verify that you can audit activity without exposing secrets.
1. Who is the agent, and who is accountable for it?
Do not let an agent act under a shared employee login or an untraceable service account. Assign it a distinct identity and record the person, team, or system responsible for sponsoring and operating it. That identity should be associated with the agent’s credentials and entitlements, so an investigator can distinguish the agent’s actions from a human’s.
NIST’s agent-identity guidance recommends unique identifiers, credentials, and entitlements associated with the user or system operating an agent. In practice, document at least:
- The agent’s identity and the workflows in which it may operate.
- Its accountable sponsor and operational owner.
- The human or system context on whose behalf it acts.
- How its access is granted, reviewed, suspended, and revoked.
Where practical, delegate access through the user’s or system’s security context rather than giving the agent a reusable, broad credential. Set a suitable credential lifetime and renewal process. Shared credentials make it harder to identify who or what performed an action and can leave access active after it is no longer needed.
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2. What task, data, and operations does the agent actually need?
Write down the specific task before enabling tools. “Help with approvals” is too broad to define safe access. Specify which workflow, records, and steps are in scope, and whether the agent needs to read, draft, submit, approve, change, or delete anything.
Inventory each tool and its operations, including extensions, generic APIs, shells, and any tools inherited from the environment. Remove unused capabilities. A read-only task should not quietly inherit write or delete functions, and access to one governance record should not imply access to every record.
| Capability | What to decide |
|---|---|
| Read | Which records, fields, and resource groups may the agent view? |
| Draft or recommend | May it prepare a proposed change or decision without submitting it? |
| Write or submit | Which exact changes or workflow submissions are allowed, and under what conditions? |
| Approve | Is the agent ever permitted to approve, or must that decision remain with an authorized person? |
| Delete or administer | Are deletion, permission changes, policy changes, or other administrative functions necessary at all? |
Keep resource scope and permissions narrow at both the agent and downstream service. If the workflow supports separate roles or resource-level permissions, use them rather than relying on the agent to choose correctly. OWASP’s LLM06:2025 guidance on excessive agency identifies excess functionality, excessive downstream permissions, and excessive autonomy as distinct risks; reducing one does not automatically fix the others.
3. Which actions need a human approval?
Classify actions by impact rather than interrupting a reviewer for every tool call. Routine, reversible, low-impact reads may not need the same gate as an irreversible approval, a financial commitment, a permission change, or an externally visible decision. Define the categories for your organization and route the actions with meaningful consequences to an authorized human.
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An approval should authorize one specific operation, not grant the agent a general permission to proceed. Bind it to the actor, tool, target resource, relevant parameters, time, and expiry. If the operation changes after review, obtain a new approval. Use short-lived approval artifacts and controls that prevent or detect replay or duplicate execution where the workflow supports them.
OWASP’s AI Agent Security Cheat Sheet states: “A valid message signature does not grant permission to perform the requested action.” In other words, verifying that a request came from the expected agent is not a substitute for checking that the agent is authorized to carry out that particular request.
Keep approval requests reviewable
Prompts should give reviewers enough context to judge the exact target and effect of the action. Avoid approval patterns that ask for confirmation so frequently that people learn to click through without considering the request. NIST warns that overused human approvals can create consent fatigue. A useful control is one that places attention on consequential actions while leaving routine, authorized work manageable.
4. Where is authorization enforced?
Enforce permissions at the downstream service or at a separate execution or policy layer that validates every request. The model’s reasoning, a tool description, a prompt instruction, or the agent’s claim that an action is allowed is not an authorization check. Verify the actor’s entitlement and any required approval against the exact operation and target before execution.
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This check must also apply when a request is relayed through another agent or service. Do not assume that an upstream agent’s approval automatically authorizes a downstream action: the receiving system still needs to validate the applicable identity, scope, and approval. OWASP recommends implementing authorization in downstream systems and independently validating sensitive or irreversible actions instead of leaving them to the model’s decision-making.
Map each protected operation to an enforcement point. If no service or execution layer can reliably verify a required permission or approval, do not expose that operation to the agent.
5. What happens when a security control is unavailable?
Decide the failure behavior before deployment. For high-impact actions, deny execution if the required risk classification, policy lookup, approval validation, or audit function is unavailable. Do not silently treat a timeout, missing response, or logging outage as permission to continue.
Make the blocked state visible to operators and give them a safe recovery path, such as restoring the control service and resubmitting the action for a fresh authorization check. Avoid automatically retrying a consequential operation unless the workflow can establish that a previous attempt did not already succeed; otherwise, a retry may create duplicate effects.
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6. Can you investigate what the agent did?
Keep records that let an authorized operator reconstruct a privileged action: agent identity, sponsor or operating context, policy decision, approval reference, tool and operation, target resource, relevant parameters, timestamp, and outcome. Record enough to answer what was requested, what was authorized, and what happened without placing passwords, access tokens, or unnecessary sensitive data in plain-text logs.
Restrict access to audit records and protect them from unauthorized alteration. Decide how long they are retained and who can review them under your organization’s policies. NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 control 03.01.07 requires preventing non-privileged users from executing privileged functions and logging privileged-function execution within that control’s stated scope. It is not a blanket statement that the control applies to every organization or governance workflow.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.7. What should you test before production?
Test the actual workflow and its enforcement points before granting production access, then repeat relevant tests after material changes to tools, prompts, policies, permissions, or agent behavior. Include both allowed and denied cases; a successful normal-path demonstration alone does not show that boundaries work.
- Confirm the agent can perform each required task and cannot use an unnecessary tool or operation.
- Try to read or change a resource outside its assigned scope, including through a generic API or alternate tool path.
- Verify that write, delete, approval, and administrative actions are separately controlled where intended.
- Test high-impact approval: confirm the reviewer sees the exact action, and that changing the target or parameters invalidates the approval.
- Check for replayed approvals or duplicate submissions, including after a timeout or interrupted response.
- Simulate unavailable policy, approval, risk-classification, and audit services; verify that protected actions fail closed.
- Exercise adversarial inputs, including prompt-injection-like content and attempts to escalate privileges or route actions through another agent.
- Inspect the resulting logs to ensure they support investigation without exposing credentials or unnecessary sensitive data.
Use adversarial testing appropriate to the system’s risk, and treat a material change as a reason to reassess—not merely assume that earlier results still apply.
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8. How to make the grant decision
Grant access only when you can answer these questions with specific controls and owners:
- What named identity will the agent use, and who sponsors it?
- What exact task, tools, operations, data, and resources are in scope?
- Are delegated credentials narrow, appropriately time-limited, and revocable?
- Which actions require approval, and does approval bind to the exact actor, operation, target, parameters, time, and expiry?
- Which downstream system independently checks authorization on every request?
- Do high-impact operations stop if a required control or audit function fails?
- Can operators investigate actions without exposing secrets in logs?
- Have both permitted and denied paths, failure cases, and relevant adversarial inputs been tested?
If an answer is unclear—especially the identity, scope, approval binding, or enforcement point—limit the agent to a lower-risk capability or defer the grant until the gap is addressed. No single control guarantees safety; apply the checklist in light of organizational policy and applicable sector requirements.
What current guidance establishes
NIST notes that existing identity protocols and authorization patterns can provide useful foundations, while agent-specific standards and practices continue to develop. The NIST NCCoE project hub describes an iterative effort on practical agent identity and authorization guidance, with an SP 1800-series practice guide and example implementations as intended outputs. In February 2026, NIST said it received over 600 responses to its concept paper; that is a response count for the project, not a measure of security effectiveness or adoption.
OWASP’s AI Agent Security Cheat Sheet and LLM06:2025 offer implementation-oriented security guidance, but neither replaces an organization’s own authorization model or applicable requirements. Check current materials from NIST and OWASP when applying them, since guidance and project deliverables may change.
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