Glossary › Excessive Agency
Excessive Agency
The failure where an agent has more permissions or tools than its task requires, so that a mistake or an injection can cause disproportionate harm. Named in the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications; the fix is scoping tools per task.
Where Excessive Agency shows up
All matching postsAI Security for Agents: Prompt Injection, Excessive Agency, and Sandboxing
Prompt injection is structurally unsolved, and agents turned it from an embarrassment into a breach. Learn the OWASP agentic risk categories, why detection fails, and the containment architecture that works: least-privilege tools, approval gates, sandboxes, provenance, and a red-team practice you run against your own harness.
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