Block malicious or unsafe tool use and privilege escalation
Agents with tool access may perform actions they should not. Guardrails inspect and block unauthorized tool calls based on defined policy.
What's at stake
- Agents with tool access can interact with systems, databases, and APIs
- A manipulated or confused agent may call tools outside its intended scope
- Privilege escalation can grant access to admin functions or sensitive operations
- A single unauthorized action can corrupt data, expose secrets, or violate compliance
- Enterprise customers require audit trails and policy enforcement for all agent actions
How to solve this
Tool-using agents are powerful but risky. They can read databases, call APIs, modify records, send emails, and interact with external systems. Each tool call is an action with real-world consequences.
The challenge is that agents can be manipulated. A prompt injection might instruct the agent to call a tool it shouldn't. A confused model might attempt privilege escalation—calling admin functions or accessing restricted resources.
The solution is to enforce policy at the tool-call boundary. Every tool invocation must be inspected before execution. The inspection checks: Is this tool allowed for this user/context? Are the arguments within permitted ranges? Does this action violate any defined policy?
Only tool calls that pass policy checks should execute. Everything else is blocked and logged.
How Superagent prevents this
Superagent provides guardrails for AI agents—small language models purpose-trained to detect and prevent failures in real time. These models sit at the boundary of your agent and inspect inputs, outputs, and tool calls before they execute.
For tool security, Superagent's Guard model intercepts every tool call your agent attempts. Before the call executes, Guard evaluates it against your defined policies: allowed tools, permitted arguments, required contexts, and prohibited actions.
Guard catches both explicit policy violations (agent calls a tool it shouldn't have access to) and subtle privilege escalation (agent modifies arguments to gain additional access). The model understands tool semantics, not just string matching.
When an unauthorized tool call is detected, Guard blocks execution and logs the attempt. Your agent receives an appropriate error response while your security team gets full visibility into what was attempted and why it was blocked.