If Agents Were Angels, No Governance Would Be Necessary: Out-of-Band Policy Enforcement at a Trusted Tool Boundary
Give an agent a human's credential and it inherits the person's reach without the judgment that limits its use. It can sweep every reachable record into model context, where hidden instructions steer its next call, and every request stays credential-valid while the agent exceeds its job or absorbs a secret. Prompts are a brittle guardrail: one fallible reasoner interprets the task and enforces its limits. We present Out-of-Band Policy Enforcement (OBPE), a trusted boundary outside agent reasoning. It authorizes the typed operation and resource, narrows the query before the backend call, then filters records and fields or masks values in the response. Semantic gating can deny or hold an au...
| Authors | Marc Millstone, Tyler Akidau, Johannes Brüderl et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
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