LLM Agent Capabilities Should Follow Task Intent and Context Source
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM agents take real actions, including executing code, modifying files, calling services, and delegating tasks, driven by context sources: user requests, tool results, documents, shell outputs, Skill and MCP instructions, memory. Unlike traditional systems, where capability is predefined, the least-privilege capability an agent needs is dynamic, depending on its task intent: what it wants to do and how. This creates a security and safety challenge: all inputs enter one shared planning channel with equal influence, by adversarial injection or accidental scope widening, yet a user's explicit request and a document's extracted text carry different trust and should not share authority to choose a destination or widen access. Existing defenses constrain operations and information flow; we study task-scoped, multi-source authority composition. We argue that agent capabilities should be scoped to the current task intent, not a sandbox or session lifetime, and that no single context source defines a complete capability. IntentCap composes capabilities from four such sources: user intent, workflow instructions, tool schemas, and runtime environment, with field-level ownership and monotonic narrowing. Each source contributes specific fields, none can fill another's, and the lease only narrows the user's authorized authority, never widens it. IntentCap uses an LLM to generate short-lived leases from these sources, validated by a deterministic checker before any side effect commits and enforced by tool- and OS-level information flow policies. Evaluation shows IntentCap blocks tested violations without rejecting benign actions, each source boundary is independently necessary, and the checker generalizes across tool, execution, placement, and delegation boundaries.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 7 of its 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2026.
Builds on
7 of 21 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2026SkillGuard: A Permission-Centric Framework for Agent Skill Security2 Jun
- 2025MCPTox: A Benchmark for Tool Poisoning Attack on Real-World MCP Servers19 Aug
- 2025Defeating Prompt Injections by Design24 Mar
- 2024IsolateGPT: An Execution Isolation Architecture for LLM-Based Agentic Systems8 Mar
Other references · 3
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026A Framework for Formalizing LLM Agent Security
- 2026Securing LLM Agents Need Intent-to-Execution Integrity
- 2026Dynamic Capability Scoping for Enterprise AI Agents: A Synthetic Dataset and Three-Source Permission Architecture
- 2026Reachability-Based Capability Confinement for LLM Agents under Indirect Prompt Injection
- 2026Capability Gates Are Not Authorization: Confused-Deputy Failures in LLM Agent Frameworks
- 2026When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents
- 2025LLM Agents Should Employ Security Principles
- 2026Towards Verifiably Safe Tool Use for LLM Agents