Local Allow, Global Deny: Why Per-Action Authorization Does Not Compose in LLM Agents
Autonomous LLM agents act through tools under per-action authorization: a local guard screens each tool call in isolation. We show that local authorization does not compose into global authorization. A compositional authorization failure (CAF) is a locally authorized execution, or a pair of locally authorized executions, that violates a global policy spanning intent, purpose, provenance, consent, and delegation. We characterize CAFs along two axes, expressiveness (single-trace safety versus relational k-safety) and observability (a ladder of monitor profiles). Our central result is an impossibility: relational purpose violations form a 2-safety hyperproperty with no per-trace locus of bla...
| Authors | Anmol Pandey, Aditya Jain, Liang Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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