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Auth By Example
Auth By Example

Posted on Originally published at permit.io

A valid token is not an AI agent audit trail

When an AI agent issues a refund or edits a record, your IdP log says a token existed and your app log says an endpoint was hit. Neither tells a reviewer why the action was allowed.

The record that does is written at decision time, and it needs a few things most stacks don't capture today:

  • Delegation: which agent acted, and on behalf of which human or workflow
  • Tool and parameters: what was actually requested, not just which API was called
  • Policy ID and version: the rule set that was evaluated at that moment
  • Decision plus reason: allow or deny, with something a person can read
  • Approval record: who approved a human-in-the-loop step, and when
  • Outcome: whether the side effect really happened

Join them with a trace ID and a tenant, and you can rebuild an agent's action months later without guessing.

Disclosure: I work at Permit.io. We wrote up the full twelve-field list, with an example record and what to leave out for read-only assistants:

https://www.permit.io/blog/ai-agent-audit-logs-12-fields?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ai-agent-audit-logs-12-fields&utm_content=authbyexample-article

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