Intent-Governed Tool Authorization for AI Agents

The paper presents Intent-Governed Access Control (IGAC), a novel server-side authorization mechanism designed for AI agents that interact with external tools. IGAC utilizes intent certificates and session-scoped policy narrowing to ensure that a user's expressed intent limits, rather than expands, the authority granted by static integration policies. This approach enhances security by allowing for intent-aware manifest filtering and consistency checks, thereby preventing unauthorized actions based on existing credentials, which is crucial for practitioners aiming to build safer AI systems that respect user intent.