Glossary
Excessive agency
An OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications risk: an LLM system given more functionality, permissions or autonomy than its task needs.
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What Excessive agency means
Excessive agency is one of the risks in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. It describes systems where a model can do more than it should: too many tools (a tool that can delete when the task only needs read), too many permissions (a database credential with write access to every table), or too much autonomy (high-impact actions without any confirmation).
The consequence is that any failure, whether a hallucination, a misunderstanding or an injection, can turn into real damage, because nothing stops the model from acting.
The primary mitigations are structural: least privilege, narrowly scoped tools, and human-in-the-loop approval for high-impact actions. A pre-execution guard complements them by judging each concrete call, for example flagging a production-mutating action with a large blast radius so that it goes to a human rather than running unattended.
Related terms
How Excessive agency connects to the rest of the vocabulary.