Glossary
Scope violation
An agent action that goes beyond the boundaries set for the task, such as touching production when told to use staging.
Checks run on our GPUs in Switzerland. Request payloads are not stored.Security
What Scope violation means
A scope violation is an action outside the limits the user or operator set: writing to production when the task said staging, editing files outside the repository, emailing someone outside the company domain, or refunding more than the policy allows. The action may be perfectly reasonable in general; it is the boundary that makes it wrong here.
Scope is usually expressed in natural language, so it is easy to state and hard to enforce with static rules alone. Where a boundary can be written as a deterministic rule (a denylist of production hosts, a maximum refund amount), write it as one.
MCP Guard accepts a constraints list, for example “staging only” or “never email outside acme.com”, and its violation head has a scope_violation class alongside policy_violation. The model judges the concrete call against those constraints, which covers cases that a rule did not anticipate.
Related terms
How Scope violation connects to the rest of the vocabulary.