I actually think this is the wrong approach to agent authorization. Here's why: If you have to explicitly configure each agent's permissions, you've lost. Because you're only going to have patience to configure so many agent permissions. So in this route you can only have a certain relatively small number of agents before configuration fatigue prevents you from making more. I don't think that's what we want. I don't think that's what's good for AI safety. What we want is an enormous number of very fine-grained agents. Each task is a new agent. And each task has exactly the permissions needed for that task, no more, no less. There's really only one known way to make that manageable: Capability-based security. The basic idea is, when you give the agent a task, you naturally give it the capabilities it needs to perform that task. Like say you want an agent to review a Google Doc. Today, with a lot of AI assistants "Hey go review the document titled Foo Spec". The agent has permissions to all your docs, so it goes and finds the right one and opens it. That's wrong. You should say "Hey, go review this document: " And then here's the key part: The harness should see that you're pasting a URL, and should infer that you want to give the agent access to that document. Only that document. No other document. Importantly, you didn't really have to do anything unusual to configure this. You just pasted the URL of the thing you wanted the agent to access. Which you probably would have done anyway. Sure, it's not always that easy. Maybe you commonly run agents that need access to 10 different things, and it's tedious to paste those 10 URLs every time. So you create some sort of a bundle that you give them. And of course, the agent should be able to ask for extra things it needs. But we need to get away from this idea that the agent always starts out with access to everything, even when it doesn't need most of it. Also, I tend to think all agent authority has to derive from a human -- contrary to what is argued here. Every "autonomous agent" has to report to someone, and uses a subset of that person's authority. This is needed for accountability -- because agents are not accountable. If you see "Claude deleted the database", what are you supposed to do about that? You need to see "Claude acting on behalf of Bob deleted the database". To be clear, I totally agree that it's problematic when Alice configures an agent with her own credentials and then Bob tells the agent to do something with those credentials. Then you'll see "Claude acting on behalf of Alice", but actually Claude was acting on behalf of Bob. The answer is that Bob should not be able to command Alice's agent. Bob has his own agent, which may have all the same context, but operates with Bob's credentials. But if Alice sets up an agent for her team, Bob maybe doesn't want to spend time configuring his own version of it with all the same credentials, that's tedious. This has to be automated. I think capabilities make this easier. Alice gave a set of capabilities to her agent. The harness should be able to look at that list, and recreate the same list using Bob's credentials, without Bob having to do much except click "OK". I realize there's a lot of hand-waving here -- this is a complicated topic. I'll drop some code next week. If you're attending AI Engineer in SF, come to my talk on Tuesday, where I will also only be able to scratch the surface in 20 minutes...