What Factors Cause Agent Plans to Diverge From Available Tool Permissions?
Agent plans diverge from permissions when the planner reasons from descriptions or past success while authorization depends on current identity, target, state, and policy.
A home agent may see a “manage files” tool and plan to move a backup, yet its delegated token permits reads only in one share. The plan can be logically sound and still be unexecutable. Alignment requires machine-readable capabilities, identity-aware preflight checks, explicit denial reasons, and replanning when permissions or resource state change between planning and execution.
Tool Descriptions Usually Hide Authorization Conditions
A name and JSON schema explain how to call a tool, not which users, paths, recipients, times, or amounts are allowed. The model fills that gap with assumptions learned from examples or earlier sessions, producing steps outside the active authority.
Research on capability representation identifies capability representation and context-dependent discovery as core problems for agent systems. Machine-readable announcements help planning, but advertised ability still needs runtime authorization. This distinction remains visible during later household testing.
Expose action-level capability descriptors with scopes, constraints, risk classes, and required approvals. Keep sensitive policy details out of the prompt when necessary, but give the planner enough abstract constraints to avoid impossible branches. The intermediate result must remain inspectable before automation follows.
Delegated Identity Can Be Narrower Than the Human Account
An agent often acts on behalf of a user through a short-lived token or service identity. Its authority may exclude administrative actions, private folders, destructive methods, or external recipients even when the human could perform them manually.
An agent permission models analysis argues that agents need permission models designed for nondeterministic delegated workflows rather than wholesale inheritance of human access. This explains why “the user can do it” is not a valid planner assumption.
Planning should bind each step to the effective actor and requested capability. If another household member, approval, or elevated credential is required, represent that dependency explicitly instead of discovering it only after several downstream steps.
Permissions and Targets Can Change After Planning
Files move, shares disconnect, tokens expire, devices go offline, approval windows close, and policies change. A plan validated at creation can fail seconds later, so the execution layer must authorize against current state immediately before each side effect.
A practical action-level permissions recommends action-level permissions enforced in the request path and logging both allowed and denied calls. Denial telemetry becomes structured feedback for replanning rather than an opaque tool error. That boundary should be measured separately under realistic operating conditions.
The failure boundary is repeated planning against impossible capabilities. After a denial, update the capability snapshot, classify whether a safe alternative exists, and stop after a bounded number of attempts. Never weaken policy or substitute a broader tool merely to complete the goal.
Run a Permission-Aware Plan Feasibility Test
Define tasks whose required permissions are fully available, partially available, expired, target-specific, approval-gated, and impossible. Generate plans from the same goal, then preflight every proposed step against the effective user, agent token, target, and current policy.
Relate failures to capability security, where tool policy layers separates possession of a narrow grant from broad ambient authority. Record impossible steps detected before execution, runtime denials, replans, approval requests, alternative tools, and final abstentions.
Pass when the planner avoids known-impossible actions, execution catches changed conditions, and denials produce safe bounded replanning. A plan that succeeds only by escalating to a broader credential is a policy failure, not agent adaptability.
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