Intent-Governed Tool Authorization for AI Agents

Abstract

Tool-using AI agents commonly operate under integration credentials whose static permissions exceed a user's current request. We present Intent-Governed Access Control (IGAC), a server-side authorization layer that converts a trusted request into a short-lived intent certificate, narrows the statically authorized tool manifest, and checks proposed tool and payload effects before execution. IGAC cannot grant authority outside static policy; confinement to the request additionally depends on certificate fidelity and sound effect bounds. We evaluate a reusable IGAC path over an OpenPort governance substrate using endpoint tests, 176 runtime-backed synthetic tasks, real-model classifier and planner pilots, 306 end-to-end model-task runtime trials, and a 36-trial benchmark-shaped external subset. In the deterministic runtime comparison, reference-certificate IGAC reduces the archived composite exposure-or-path indicator from 1.0000 to 0. In the end-to-end model runs, the combined IGAC-OpenPort path records no completed unsafe executions, although unsafe accepted authority remains 0.0909-0.2727 and every residual case is a non-executed draft. A trace-backed normalizer counterfactual removes this residual authority at substantial utility cost. The results support static-policy non-expansion and identify certificate precision as the principal remaining bottleneck.