Human in the Loop Control for OpenClaw
Some agent actions are too consequential to leave to policy alone. This post describes a new OpenClaw demo that uses Cedar and a Yubikey to put a human in the loop, binding each approval to the exact action being approved. Because the control lives in the harness rather than the prompt, the agent can't reason its way around it.
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The Pressure Behind Identity's Diseconomies of Scale
Eve Maler argues that identity's apparent diseconomies of scale are really about gnarliness, not size. That gnarliness has a shape I drew for chapter 19 of my forthcoming book: the gap between a growing decision surface and the infrastructure meant to govern it. That gap is authorization pressure, and it explains why identity gets harder even when a team does everything right.
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The Shape of Context in Agentic Authorization
In agentic systems, the principal, action, and resource are often unknown until the moment an agent acts, and the context that governs the decision arrives as a flood of signals from many sources. This post looks at how that context takes shape, where each signal is actually consumed, and why a non-directed world of agents still needs decisions that humans can inspect and predict.
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It's Not Just What Agents Can Do...It's When They Can Do It!
Agents don't just perform actions; they execute plans where the safety of each step depends on what has already happened. That makes sequencing an authorization problem. This post explores how policy, delegation data, and multi-signature approval can govern the order in which agents receive authority, not just the scope of it.
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Agentic AI and Dynamic Authorization: A Series Recap
I've been exploring how policy, delegation, and continuous authorization can make agentic AI systems useful without making them ungovernable. This post ties together nine essays that trace that journey from foundational ideas to practical patterns.
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Cross-Domain Delegation in a Society of Agents
Cross-domain delegation requires more than transferring a credential. In a society of agents, policies define boundaries, promises communicate intent derived from those policies, credentials carry delegated authority, and reputation allows trust to emerge through repeated interactions.
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Delegation as Data: Applying Cedar Policies to OpenClaw Subagents
Intra-domain delegation enables an agent to grant constrained authority to subagents without expanding the system’s trust boundary. In the OpenClaw + Cedar demo, delegation is modeled as data and enforced by a stable policy set, preserving policy integrity while allowing dynamic scoping of power.
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Childproofing the Control Plane: Using Cedar to Build Frontal Lobes for Agentic Systems
Connecting an agent like OpenClaw to Home Assistant can make home automation more adaptive and intelligent, but it also introduces real risks if authority is not clearly bounded. By externalizing decision logic into deterministic Cedar policies, we can create governed autonomy that allows agents to act usefully while preventing them from crossing safety, security, and privacy boundaries.
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Beyond Denial: Using Policy Constraints to Guide OpenClaw Planning
OpenClaw agents plan, adapt, and act over time, so authorization that functions merely as a reactive gate isn't the best architecture. In this post, I show how integrating Cedar's query constraints and Typed Partial Evaluation lets OpenClaw discover what is allowed before acting. The result is an agent that plans within policy-defined boundaries while still enforcing every concrete action at runtime.
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A Policy-Aware Agent Loop with Cedar and OpenClaw
This article demonstrates how to move authorization inside the agent loop by inserting a Cedar-backed policy decision point into OpenClaw, so that every tool invocation is evaluated at runtime. Instead of acting as a one-time gate, authorization becomes a continuous feedback signal that guides replanning and enforces Zero Trust principles for agentic systems.
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Why Authorization Is the Hard Problem in Agentic AI
Agentic AI systems expose the limits of static authorization models, which assume permissions can be decided once and remain valid over time. As agents plan, act, and replan, authorization must become a continuous feedback signal that constrains behavior at each step rather than a one-time gate. Dynamic, policy-based authorization enables delegation to be enforced through purpose, scope, conditions, and duration, turning denial into a productive signal that guides replanning instead of a terminal failure.
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From Architecture to Accountability: How AI Helps Policy Become Practice
Architecture alone does not make authorization trustworthy. Over time, access control only works if intent can be understood, traced, and shown to produce legitimate outcomes in real systems. This post explores how AI can support the governance of access control by helping teams connect policy intent to effective access, producing coherent evidence that policy behaves the way it is meant to.
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Authorization Before Retrieval: Making RAG Safe by Construction
Retrieval-augmented generation makes language models far more useful by grounding them in real data, But it also raises a hard question: who is allowed to see what? This post shows how authorization can be enforced before retrieval, ensuring that RAG systems remain powerful without becoming dangerous.
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What AI Can Tell You About Your Authorization Policies
AI shouldn't decide who can access what, but it can help you understand what the system already allows. Used as an auditor or reviewer, AI becomes a lens for exposing scope, risk, and undocumented assumptions in authorization systems.
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Policy Authoring and Analysis with AI
AI doesn’t belong in the business of deciding who can access what, but it can be an effective partner in reasoning about authorization policies. When used inside clear guardrails, AI helps humans author, analyze, and refine policies without taking over access decisions.
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AI Is Not Your Policy Engine (And That's a Good Thing)
If your access control lives in a prompt, it isn’t access control. Authorization decisions must be deterministic and enforced before an LLM ever sees data. Treating AI as a policy engine is a category error with real consequences.
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Early Access to Dynamic Authorization
The first six chapters of my new book, Dynamic Authorization: Adaptive Access Control, are now available in Manning’s Early Access Program. The book explores why authorization is still misunderstood, and how new tools like Cedar enable secure, flexible systems that also improve employee and customer experience.
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Zero Trust, Least Privilege, and Just-in-Time Access
When dynamic access control with JIT access is thoughtfully implemented, you shift the burden of security from employees to systems that automate protection, making it proactive and intelligent.
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The Business Case for Dynamic Authorization
Access management is seen by many business leaders as primarily a means of protecting and securing computer systems. Important, but of secondary importance to the business. But as computer systems come to intermediate almost every interaction the business has with employees, contractors, partners, and customers, dynamic authorization should be seen as a strategic business enabler. Investing in a robust, flexible, and pervasive authorization infrastructure can drive revenue growth, operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and competitive differentiation. Reducing Operational Costs Manually managing access using rigid, static authorization models like ACLs and groups is labor-intensive and prone to errors. Organizations that rely
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Authorization Matters
I've become very interested in the topic of authorization over the last year and plan to write about it more. I hope you'll follow along.
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