Permissions, Sandboxes, and Human Approval

~30 min · permissions, sandbox, approval

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Tools give power; policy gives shape

An agent with tools is an actor in your system. That actor needs least privilege, audit logs, and explicit approval boundaries. Prompting the agent to be careful is not a permission model.

Classify tools by blast radius

Read-only tools can often run freely. Write tools need validation. Destructive tools need human approval or tightly scoped automation. Privileged tools require identity, policy, and audit trail.

Code execution deserves special suspicion. Use containers, restricted subprocesses, ephemeral workspaces, network limits, and timeouts. Never run untrusted generated code directly on a valuable host.

Approval must be semantic

Do not ask a user to approve call tool X with args Y if they cannot understand the effect. Ask for approval in human terms: “delete these 3 files,” “send this email to these recipients,” “deploy this commit to production.”

Code

Permission gate·python

RISK = {
    "read_file": "read",
    "write_file": "write",
    "delete_file": "destructive",
    "send_email": "external_write",
    "deploy": "privileged",
}

def require_approval(tool_name, args):
    level = RISK.get(tool_name, "unknown")
    if level in {"destructive", "external_write", "privileged", "unknown"}:
        return {
            "approval_required": True,
            "human_summary": summarize_effect(tool_name, args),
        }
    return {"approval_required": False}

External links

OpenAI Agents SDK guardrails

Exercise

Create a risk table for five tools in your imagined agent. Decide which require human approval and write the human-readable approval text.

Hint

Approval text should describe consequences, not implementation details.

Progress

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