How to Handle Authorization Between Agents

Square_Secretary_944 · reddit · 2026-07-16

The author discusses why "authentication does not equal authorization" becomes a sharper issue in the agent-to-agent era: when both ends of a message are handled by agents, the traditional step of relying on human review for judgment is no longer scalable.

They argue against treating "message text" as an execution unit. Instead, before execution, information like intent, identity, permission basis, relationship, requested action, scope of impact, and evidence must be structured and auditable. The receiver decides what is acceptable, while the sender can only request priority, not automatically gain execution rights. Finally, the author poses two open questions:

The author also mentions they are building a product in this space, starting with email scenarios, to validate whether this problem model holds true.

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