Authorization & Policy Engine

Agent identity + delegated authority + contextual policy + runtime enforcement is the central product moat.

Priority: P0
Phase: MVP
Primary owner: Policy / Security Eng
Status: Blueprint

Objective

This is the heart of the product. The engine evaluates an agent’s identity, delegated authority, requested action, resource, context and risk to produce an explainable decision. Policies should be deterministic, testable, versioned and easy enough for security teams to operate without writing application code.

What to build

Decision outcomes: allow, deny, redact, transform, rate-limit, require approval, require step-up auth, sandbox or route to safer tool/model.
Policy conditions: agent, owner, department, environment, tool, action, data class, destination, amount, geography, time, risk and delegation depth.
Policy sets at organization, business-unit, application, agent and resource levels.
Simulation mode to show impact before enforcement.

Implementation decisions

Build a policy DSL plus a visual policy builder that compiles to the same engine.
Guarantee deterministic evaluation for hard controls; AI classifiers may contribute signals but not silently override hard rules.
Return human-readable explanation and matched policy IDs with every decision.
Cache safe policy bundles at gateways for low-latency/local evaluation.

Definition of done

Policy decisions can be reproduced from stored inputs/version.
Conflicting policies resolve predictably using documented precedence.
Security can test policy changes against historical traffic before deployment.

Success metrics

Policy latency
Decision error rate
Policies in enforce vs monitor mode
Prevented high-risk actions

CORE IP

Agent identity + delegated authority + contextual policy + runtime enforcement is the central product moat.

This control is specified on page 18 of the blueprint.