Access Control
Access control is the security discipline of regulating who or what can view, use, or modify resources in a computing environment. It encompasses the policies, mechanisms, and technologies that determine what actions an authenticated identity is authorized to perform.
Why It Matters
Access control operates at multiple layers: network access control (who can connect), application access control (who can use a feature), data access control (who can read or modify specific records), and action-level access control (who can perform specific operations).
AI agents require action-level access control because their behavior is non-deterministic. The same agent might need read access for one task and write access for another. Evaluating authorization at the action level, per tool call, is the only model that provides meaningful security for autonomous actors.
The evolution from coarse-grained (network perimeter) to fine-grained (per-action) access control mirrors the progression from on-premises to cloud to agent architectures. Each shift increases the granularity of trust decisions required.