Financial & Operational Actions
What AI can do: Payments, purchasing, account changes, vendor activity, approvals, financial reporting, and operational decisions.
Authority risk: An AI system may have valid access to financial and operational systems while lacking authority for a particular transaction, amount, account, vendor, or action.
Crossing Enterprise Boundaries
What AI can do: AI agents increasingly have access to browsers, APIs, external services, networks, credentials, tools, and the public internet.
Authority risk: An agent can interpret an objective in a way that leads it outside the enterprise to a resource that was never intended to be part of the assignment. Technical reach should never be mistaken for authority to use it.
Customer & Enterprise Data
What AI can do: Customer records, sensitive information, internal data, data movement, substitutions, updates, and disclosure.
Authority risk: An AI system may technically possess broad access to enterprise data while its actual authority is limited to a specific customer, purpose, dataset, geography, or task.
IT & Infrastructure
What AI can do: Configuration changes, system administration, cloud operations, privileged actions, access changes, infrastructure workflows, and production environments.
Authority risk: An agent with powerful administrative credentials can make technically valid changes that exceed the task, approval, environment, or operational authority it was given.
Software Development
What AI can do: Code changes, repository access, tool invocation, deployment, CI/CD workflows, autonomous development agents, and agent-to-agent software operations.
Authority risk: An AI developer may have permission to modify code or trigger deployment while lacking authority to change a repository, alter security controls, introduce dependencies, or deploy into production.
Regulated & High-Consequence Environments
What AI can do: Government, defense, healthcare, financial services, critical infrastructure, and other environments where decisions carry significant consequences.
Authority risk: An AI action may require specific authority, approvals, separation of duties, evidence, and operating conditions-not simply technical access to the system.
Multi-Agent Workflows
What AI can do: One agent may interpret an objective, delegate part of it to another agent, which calls another tool, agent, API, or service before the final action occurs.
Authority risk: At every handoff, intent can be reinterpreted, context can change, and authority can expand beyond the original mandate.