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Freedom251 › Blog › AI agents

How Can You Tell Which User Authorized an AI Agent’s Action?

By Freedom251 Team · · 9 min read

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You can attribute an AI agent’s action to a particular user only when the protected resource receives and records verifiable evidence linking five things: the authenticated human, the distinct agent identity, the client or host application, the permissions granted, and the exact resource action. A service-account name, agent label, or shared API key alone does not prove which person authorized the operation.

The evidence an attribution must contain

Start at the point where the agent calls the protected API, database, file store, or other resource. The request should carry a validated identity and delegation context, and the resource should create an audit event that can be joined to the authorization record. Attribution is credible only when the records agree about who, what, where, when, and under whose authority.

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Evidence What it should establish Why it matters
Human principal The authenticated user represented by a validated subject or equivalent trusted identity context Shows whose authority is being exercised
Agent identity The specific agent, workload, or child identity that made the call Separates the software actor from the person
Client or host The application that initiated the interaction or carried the agent exchange Identifies the component that requested or relayed the action
Grant and consent Who approved the permissions, which scopes were granted, and whether approval was by a user or an administrator Shows the legal and policy basis for delegation
Resource and audience The API or resource for which the credential was issued, and the target object affected Prevents a valid token for one service being treated as authority everywhere
Audit linkage A timestamped, verifiable connection between the grant, identities, request, result, and affected object Allows an investigator to reconstruct the action rather than infer it

If any of these elements is missing, describe the attribution as incomplete. In particular, do not infer a human authorizer from an agent name, a broad role, or a shared secret.

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Keep the human, agent, and client identities separate

Human principal

The human is the person whose authority is delegated. The system must authenticate that person through an identity provider or another trusted mechanism and preserve the resulting subject identifier. A display name in an application log is not enough; use a stable identifier whose issuer, tenant, and authentication event can be checked.

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Agent identity

The agent is a separate workload or application identity. It may be a long-running service, a particular agent instance, or a child identity created for a task. Recording only the user hides which software actually acted; recording only the agent hides whose authority it used. Both identities belong in the request context and audit event.

Client or host application

The client is the application that started the interaction or passed a user token to the agent. It can differ from the agent and from the protected API. Preserve this identity as a separate field, because a client might invoke multiple agents or route requests through a host that applies its own policy.

Authentication, authorization, and consent answer different questions

  • Authentication: Which principal or credential is present?
  • Authorization: What operations can that principal perform on a named resource?
  • Consent or delegation: Who granted that authority, under which policy, tenant, and scope?

A validated token can authenticate a caller and express permissions without proving that a person approved the exact sentence in a chat or every individual tool call. Microsoft’s on-behalf-of documentation describes delegated API access after consent; it does not define intent-signing for each action. Treat a user’s consent to a scope as permission for the stated class of operations, not as proof of approval for every future action the agent might select.

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A practical investigation, step by step

  1. Obtain the trusted request context. Ask the system owner for the token-validation result or equivalent context attached to the exact resource call. Capture issuer, subject, tenant, audience or resource, scopes or roles, agent identity, client identity, token issue and expiry times, and any delegation or actor claims. Do not rely on an unverified string copied into an application log.
  2. Validate the credential. Use an approved OAuth or identity-library implementation to check signature, issuer, expiry, intended audience, and relevant policy claims. Confirm that the token was issued for the resource that received it. NIST guidance warns that bearer tokens and static API keys do not prove who is presenting them and recommends dynamic, tightly scoped, audience-restricted credentials.
  3. Identify the human separately. Locate the authenticated user’s subject and tenant, then verify that the subject came from the trusted identity system rather than from agent-supplied text. If no human subject or equivalent trusted delegation context exists, the record cannot establish a user authorizer.
  4. Identify the agent and client. Match the agent credential or workload identity to the deployed agent and match the client identifier to the application that initiated the flow. A single shared service account used by many agents is an attribution weakness unless another trustworthy per-request binding exists.
  5. Inspect the grant. Find the consent or administrative approval record for the relevant user, tenant, agent, client, scopes, and time period. Distinguish user consent from tenant-wide administrator consent: the former represents an individual’s approval within allowed policy, while the latter authorizes an application or workload for users covered by the administrator’s decision.
  6. Check the boundary. Compare the granted scopes or roles with the actual operation and target object. Confirm that the token’s audience, resource, tenant, and lifetime fit the call. Broad permissions can let an agent reach unexpected tools even when the user identity is known.
  7. Join the resource audit event. Correlate request ID, token or session context, timestamp, agent, client, user, target object, operation, and result. Verify that the audit store is protected against alteration and that clock differences or retries do not create a false match.
  8. Test for credential reuse. Determine whether another actor could have replayed a bearer token, copied a long-lived secret, or used the same service account. If replay cannot be ruled out, report that the credential was used, not that the named user personally caused the action.

What a Microsoft interactive-agent flow demonstrates

Microsoft’s documentation for interactive agents describes a concrete sequence rather than a universal rule. Permissions are granted through supported consent or inheritable-permission configuration. The user is authenticated and a token is obtained. The receiving component validates that token and extracts user claims. It then acquires a downstream API token with OAuth On-Behalf-Of (OBO).

In OBO, a client-supplied user token is exchanged for a token to call a downstream API on behalf of the original user. The downstream service must still validate its token and enforce its own scopes and resource boundary. Seeing an OBO token is evidence of delegated access, not independent proof that the user approved a particular natural-language instruction.

Microsoft’s Agent ID OBO documentation adds an agent identity to this pattern: an agent receives a user token from a client application and performs an OBO exchange. The documented agent identity blueprints and child identities cannot themselves start an interactive /authorize flow in that configuration. Permissions therefore have to be preauthorized or consented through the supported setup. These are Microsoft-specific implementation details; other platforms may use different claim names, exchanges, or restrictions.

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Compare the evidence quality of common patterns

Pattern Identity separation Consent provenance Attribution quality Main weakness
Shared API key or service account Usually none; many callers look identical Often absent or outside the request Unproven for a specific user Anyone holding the secret can present it
Agent-only token Agent is identified; human and client may be missing Not necessarily carried downstream Shows which workload acted, not who authorized it Cannot bind the operation to a person without a trusted delegation record
Delegated OAuth/OBO flow Human, client, and agent can be represented separately User or administrator consent can be inspected Strongest when claims, scopes, and audit events are joined Implementation may omit claims, use broad scopes, or fail to protect logs
IETF agent-specific proposal Explicit user, client, and agent claims are proposed Consent screen would show the requested agent and scopes Potentially clearer if implemented draft-oauth-ai-agents-on-behalf-of-user-00 is an expired Internet-Draft, not a finalized standard

Use narrow, audience-bound permissions

NIST’s cybersecurity guidance emphasizes that modern identity systems do not automatically produce least privilege. Prefer short-lived, dynamically issued credentials restricted to a named audience or resource and to the smallest practical set of operations. Bind each downstream exchange to the validated context rather than forwarding an unrestricted bearer token through multiple services.

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Review both role assignments and delegated scopes. A role such as “editor” may cover an entire repository, while the action required only one record. Reduce standing access, separate read and write capabilities, and make high-impact operations require an additional policy decision or human approval. Record the policy version used so an investigator can tell whether a later change altered the decision.

Design audit records for reconstruction

An audit event should contain, at minimum, the event time, resource and object, operation, result, request or correlation ID, human subject, agent identity, client identity, issuer and audience, scopes or roles, consent or policy reference, and the token-exchange chain when there are multiple hops. Store the event in a tamper-evident system with controlled access, retention rules, and a way to verify integrity.

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Logs alone do not guarantee cryptographic non-repudiation. NIST’s NCCoE concept paper, published in February 2026, frames “How do we ensure non-repudiation for agent actions and binding back to human authorization?” as an open question. It similarly asks how to handle delegation in on-behalf-of scenarios and how to bind agent identity with human identity for human-in-the-loop authorization. Those questions signal active design work, not a solved universal mechanism.

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Common failure modes and the correct conclusion

Only an agent name appears

Conclusion: the workload is identified, but the human authorizer is not. Request the validated user context and grant record before assigning responsibility.

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A broad role is listed

Conclusion: the account may have been allowed to perform the operation, but the role does not show who approved this use or whether the scope was appropriate. Check consent, policy, and the exact target.

A bearer token is valid but reusable

Conclusion: the token was accepted by the resource, yet another actor might have replayed it. Preserve the replay analysis and avoid claiming that the named subject personally initiated the call.

Consent exists but no downstream correlation

Conclusion: authority was granted in principle, but the action cannot be reliably tied to that grant. Improve propagation of correlation IDs and delegation claims, then protect the resulting audit trail.

The agent chose an unexpected tool

Conclusion: valid user delegation does not make every agent decision expected or safe. Investigate tool authorization, prompt-injection defenses, scope limits, and approval gates separately from identity attribution.

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How to report an attribution finding

State exactly what the evidence proves. For example: “The resource accepted a token for user subject U, issued to client C for agent A, with scope S and audience R; the consent record dated T authorizes that scope, and the audit event matches request ID Q.” If a link in that chain is missing, say “the action is attributed to agent A’s credential, but a human authorizer is unproven.” This wording distinguishes observed facts from assumptions and gives the system owner a concrete remediation target.

What to verify before trusting a deployment

  • Are human, agent, and client identities separate fields in every relevant request and audit event?
  • Can the issuer, subject, audience, expiry, scopes, and tenant of each token be validated?
  • Is there a retrievable record showing who granted or approved the permissions?
  • Are user consent and administrator consent distinguished?
  • Does delegated context survive each downstream hop without relying on unverified headers?
  • Are permissions narrow enough for the target resource and operation?
  • Are tokens short-lived, protected, revocable, and resistant to replay where practical?
  • Can the resource event be joined to the grant and identity context using a protected correlation record?
  • Has the deployment’s actual behavior been verified rather than inferred from a protocol label?

If the answer to the identity, grant, or audit questions is no, the defensible answer is not a person’s name. It is that the system can show which credential or agent acted, but cannot establish which user authorized that specific action.

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AI agentsaudit loggingcybersecuritydelegationIdentity and Access ManagementOAuth

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