Glossary
Least privilege
The principle that each component, including an AI agent, should have only the permissions its task requires, and no more.
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What Least privilege means
The principle of least privilege, set out by Saltzer and Schroeder in 1975, says every program and user should operate with the smallest set of privileges needed to do the job. For agents that means scoped API keys, read-only database roles where writes are not needed, per-task tool sets, and short-lived credentials.
Least privilege limits the damage from any failure, whether the cause is a model error, a hallucinated argument or a successful prompt injection. It is the most reliable answer to excessive agency, because it does not depend on detecting anything.
It is also hard to apply perfectly: agents are useful precisely because they can do many things. A pre-execution guard covers some of the gap between the permissions an agent has and the actions it should take right now. Use both.
Related terms
How Least privilege connects to the rest of the vocabulary.