Intent as a Security Boundary

This essay argues that current access control models (like ABAC and Zero Trust) are insufficient for AI agents because they evaluate single requests rather than the full trajectory of a task. It introduces "intent governance" as a new security layer that compares an agent's registered purpose (declared at design time) against its runtime actions and executed scope. The author identifies three layers of intent—registered, declared, and executed—and three failure patterns: prompt injection, delegated intent poisoning, and intent drift. The proposed solution includes scope binding, drift detection, and purpose expiry (task-completion revocation). The piece concludes that intent governance is an architectural addition, not a policy tweak, and treats purpose as a measurable security primitive to detect misalignment even when authentication and permissions are valid. 

https://puneetbhatnagar.substack.com/p/intent-as-a-security-boundary

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