AI Governance And Control / Authorization And Governance
ReBAC for Agentic AI
Why relationship-based authorization matters when agents work with people, data, and tools.
Why relationship-based authorization matters when agents work with people, data, and tools.
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Executive note
Core Idea
Relationship-based authorization checks whether a subject can perform an action on an object because of a relationship.
Examples include owner, member, viewer, editor, approver, delegate, service, parent, child, or participant.
This matters for AI because agents often act on behalf of people. The question is not simply "is the user an admin?" The question may be "can this user ask this agent to use this tool on this dataset for this purpose?"
Section 2 of 5
Why Roles Are Not Enough
Coarse roles are useful. They keep broad platform access simple. They are not enough for fine-grained agent behavior.
A user may be:
ReBAC lets the system represent those relationships directly.
- A curriculum editor for one academy, but not another.
- A credential verifier, but not a credential issuer.
- Allowed to view analytics for one business unit, but not enterprise-wide.
- Allowed to ask an agent to draft content, but not publish it.
Section 3 of 5
How It Applies To Agents
Agents need authorization before sensitive tool use. They should not infer permission from the prompt, the user's confidence, or the fact that a tool is available.
Useful checks look like:
- Can this user view this brief?
- Can this editor publish this curriculum?
- Can this agent call this tool for this user?
- Can this workflow issue this credential?
- Can this service read this user's progress evidence?
Section 4 of 5
Recommended Practices
- Keep Entra ID for identity and coarse roles.
- Use OpenFGA for fine-grained relationships.
- Check authorization in APIs and tool gateways, not only the UI.
- Include user, agent, tool, object, action, and decision in telemetry.
- Keep authorization models versioned with each solution module.
- Avoid direct writes to OpenFGA internals; use supported APIs and migrations.
Section 5 of 5
Remember This
ReBAC turns access control into a graph of real relationships.
For agentic AI, that graph is what prevents a fluent request from becoming an unauthorized action.