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An AI agent delegation policy should say who authorizes an agent, what identity it acts under, exactly what it may do and for how long, whether it can delegate further, which actions need human approval, and how access is enforced, logged, reviewed, and revoked. The central rule is simple: an agent may exercise only authority explicitly granted for its task; it cannot grant itself more.
NIST NCCoE’s February 2026 concept paper treats agent identity and authorization as active design questions, not as a finished universal template. The controls below are a practical policy blueprint informed by that work, OWASP security guidance, and Microsoft’s vendor-authored shared-responsibility guidance. Adapt them to your systems and risk requirements.
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Start with a grant that can be traced to an accountable principal
Every delegated action needs a clear source of authority. The policy should identify the human or organization authorizing the work, the agent expected to act, and the people responsible for approving, operating, and reviewing that grant. The agent’s identity must be distinguishable from the person or service that authorized it, while remaining traceable to that principal.
Define which agents, environments, users, business processes, and systems the policy covers. Assign an owner to the policy and establish who can issue, change, and revoke grants. Microsoft’s shared-responsibility guidance emphasizes that customers retain responsibility for data, identity and token scope, action authorization, human oversight, and acceptable use regardless of deployment model.
What each delegation grant should specify
Make each grant task-bound, explicit, and limited in duration. Avoid broad language such as “manage the account” when the task is to read a particular record or make a particular change. State permissions in terms that the enforcement system can check.
- Principal and agent: the authorizing person or organization, the agent identity, and any relevant service identity.
- Purpose and task: why access is being granted and the work the agent is allowed to perform.
- Scope: permitted tools, operations, resources, data classes, tenants, and environments.
- Capability: distinguish read, write, send, delete, execute, and administrative rights instead of bundling them into one broad permission.
- Time and status: when the grant starts and expires, and how completion, cancellation, or revocation ends it.
- Delegation rule: whether the agent may call or create sub-agents and, if so, the limits on that authority.
Apply least privilege and minimum functionality: give the agent only the operations needed for the task. OWASP warns that an extension that appears to read information may also carry unnecessary write or delete privileges. Prefer a narrow, operation-specific interface where one is practical, and enforce permissions using the identity that accesses the downstream system.
Set boundaries for sub-agents and onward delegation
If an agent can pass work to another agent, say so directly in the grant. Name eligible sub-agents or define how they are approved, limit the work and duration they receive, and prohibit onward delegation unless it is separately authorized. A sub-agent must not gain more authority than its parent grant allows.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchPreserve enough authorization context with each downstream action to verify the originating principal, the agent chain, the current grant, and the resource being accessed. This is a design challenge, particularly when work crosses organizational or system boundaries. NIST’s concept paper identifies multi-hop delegation and binding authorization context as topics for further work. Its summary of public comments describes signed delegation information and scope attenuation as proposals from commenters, not as a settled universal standard.
Classify actions and decide when a person must approve
Build a risk-based action matrix for each workflow. Specify which actions can run autonomously, which require approval, and which are prohibited. Do not rely on an agent’s own assessment as the approval gate for an action it is about to take.
| Policy category | How to define it | Examples to assess |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous within grant | Permit only low-risk actions that fit the task, scope, and current grant; log consequential activity. | Retrieving an in-scope record or preparing a draft without sending it. |
| Approval required | Pause execution until an authorized person approves the specific proposed action. | Payments, privilege changes, destructive operations, production deployments, or external communications. |
| Prohibited | Block actions that the organization will not delegate, even if requested by a user or suggested by the agent. | Set explicit prohibitions appropriate to the workflow, such as an operation outside its authorized environment. |
Bind an approval to the actual actor, tool, target, normalized parameters, time, and expiry. An approval for one recipient, amount, environment, or operation should not silently authorize a changed request. OWASP recommends short-lived authorization artifacts and replay protection for irreversible operations; it also advises failing closed when risk classification, approval validation, policy lookup, or audit logging fails.
Enforce authorization outside the model
Put the decisive check in a policy service, gateway, tool-execution proxy, or downstream application—not in a prompt or the agent’s interpretation of a policy. Before each request, check the current principal, agent identity, task, grant, target, and any required approval. Recheck when the action is executed, rather than assuming a plan approved earlier is still authorized.
A model-generated plan, system prompt, or statement that the user consented is not proof of authorization. OWASP’s guidance calls for complete mediation by downstream systems and separate validation of scope, privilege, and approval before high-impact execution. If the policy service or required audit mechanism is unavailable, define whether the action must stop; for high-impact actions, the safe default is to deny execution until the checks succeed.
Keep untrusted content from changing authority
Webpages, emails, documents, retrieved passages, tool responses, and outputs from other agents are data—not sources of permission. They can inform a proposal, but they must not create a grant, widen a scope, change an approval threshold, suppress logging, or bypass an execution check.
Specify which trusted components and roles may issue or modify grants. Separate instructions from retrieved content in the system design, and keep approval and enforcement checks independent of content supplied to the model. Microsoft recommends treating tool, retrieval, and agent outputs as untrusted and gating high-impact actions; NIST identifies direct and indirect prompt-injection prevention and impact reduction as areas to address.
Define the audit record and incident response
For consequential actions, retain a record that lets an investigator reconstruct both the authority and the outcome. Capture the principal, agent identity and delegation chain, grant or policy version, task, effective permissions, requested action, tool, target, parameters, approval, result, and timestamp.
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Set rules for log access, retention, integrity protection, alerting, and incident response. Monitor for unusual tool activity and investigate unexpected changes in capabilities or permissions. NIST raises tamper-resistant, verifiable logging and non-repudiation as issues to resolve; OWASP recommends audit trails and runtime monitoring.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Control changes, expiry, and operational limits
Keep a versioned capability manifest that lists what each agent component can do, including which capabilities can cause external effects. Review changes to tools, permissions, instructions, data sources, identities, and orchestration before they are introduced. Recertify grants on a defined schedule and revoke those that are no longer needed. OWASP threat-modeling guidance recommends connecting the threat model to the capability manifest and monitoring runtime tool behavior for drift.
Set operational ceilings suited to the workflow, such as limits on steps, loops, elapsed time, spend, request rate, or data egress. Define how exceptions are approved, how long they last, what compensating controls apply, and when a problem must be escalated. Microsoft identifies orchestration limits, multi-agent trust boundaries, action logging, and sandboxing among agent-specific responsibility areas.
Evaluate implementation approaches against the policy
NIST does not endorse one universal delegation mechanism in the sources cited here. Whether an organization uses existing identity infrastructure, a policy service, signed authorization artifacts, or another approach, assess it against the outcomes the policy requires:
- Can it bind an accountable human or organizational principal to a distinct agent identity?
- Can grants be limited by task, tool, operation, resource, and time?
- Can downstream systems verify the delegation chain and prevent scope widening?
- Where is each action authorized, and can approval be bound to the exact action?
- Can credentials and grants expire or be revoked promptly?
- Do logs provide useful, integrity-protected evidence for audits and incident response?
- Does the approach work across the organization’s identity systems and any relevant organizational boundaries?
These are evaluation questions, not evidence that any one token format or mechanism is already a universal standard. NIST’s concept paper frames agent identity, authorization, delegation, audit, and prompt injection as active design and standards questions.
Quick Recap
Turn the policy into an executable checklist
- Identify the accountable principal and agent. Make the grant traceable to the person or organization authorizing it.
- Write the task and scope. Specify allowed tools, operations, resources, data, environment, and expiry.
- Decide whether sub-delegation is permitted. Constrain eligible agents, inherited scope, duration, and onward delegation.
- Classify actions. Mark each relevant action autonomous, approval-required, or prohibited.
- Implement independent checks. Verify current authorization at execution time in the policy or downstream enforcement layer.
- Protect against untrusted input. Prevent retrieved or tool-returned content from changing grants or bypassing gates.
- Log and review. Record authority and outcome, monitor for drift, recertify grants, and revoke stale access.
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