Put a permission gate on your AI agent in 5 minutes (MCP + Claude Code + CI)

Kunko AI Labs — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:22:40 +0000

Your agent's permissions drift silently. A PR adds an MCP server with write scope, or allow: Bash(*) lands in .claude/settings.json while the runbook says "a human approves". Tests don't catch it. Linters don't catch it. Here's a 5-minute gate that does.

Step 1: declare the promise

Create agent-assurance.yaml in your repo — what the agent may do, in plain config:

# agent-assurance.yaml (simplified)
capabilities: [read]        # no write, no execute, no external send
data: [internal]            # no customer data, no credentials
autonomy: L2                # a human approves actions

Step 2: scan locally

pipx install agent-assurance
agent-assurance scan .

You get the observed blast radius plus a "declared vs observed" verdict. Now break it on purpose — add an MCP server with write scope — and watch it point at the file and line.

Step 3: gate the PR

# .github/workflows/agent-assurance.yml
permissions: { contents: read, pull-requests: write }
steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v4
  - uses: kunko-ai-labs/agent-assurance@v0.5
    with:
      mode: diff
      manifest: agent-assurance.yaml

Every PR now gets one comment, updated on every push, plus a red check when the promise breaks. On push/release, switch to mode: scan for SARIF findings in the Security tab and in-toto attestations.

Why this shape

Two checks: AA-001 blast radius (if it misbehaves, how much breaks?) and AA-002 declared vs observed. Unknown servers come out UNKNOWN — scored conservatively, never a silent pass. An inferred guess (e.g. a tool named billing.issue_refund → financial) only ever triggers review, never fails a build.

It's deterministic — no LLM in the verdict — makes no network calls, and never reads a secret's value. Every release ships Sigstore-signed SLSA provenance, and the whole thing is Apache-2.0: https://github.com/kunko-ai-labs/agent-assurance

Try breaking it. That's the point. 🧪

DEV Community: Kunko AI Labs

Put a permission gate on your AI agent in 5 minutes (MCP + Claude Code + CI)

Step 1: declare the promise

Step 2: scan locally

Step 3: gate the PR

Why this shape