Excessive agency

An AI agent with more tools, permissions or autonomy than its task needs, so a mistake or an injected instruction can do real damage.

The term comes from the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications, which names three causes: excessive functionality (a tool that can delete when the task only reads), excessive permissions (a database user with write access to everything) and excessive autonomy (acting without a person approving high-impact steps). The model will sometimes be wrong or manipulated; agency decides how much that costs.

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Related terms

Lethal trifecta: An AI agent that has private data, reads untrusted content and can send data out can be tricked into leaking that data.
Guardrails: Checks around a model that block, fix or flag inputs and outputs that break the rules.
Human in the loop: A person approves, edits or rejects the agent’s action before it takes effect.
OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications: OWASP’s list of the most important security risks in applications built on language models, with a separate list for AI agents.

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