Your Agent Just Authorized What?! — Jay Mok & Ben Coumes, Paypal
Agent authorization should scale with stakes and reversibility: logs may cover coding changes, while open-ended payments need scoped, time-bound, independently verifiable mandates.
PayPal frames authorization around **three questions**: did the human approve, is the action currently within scope, and can that approval be proven later. Its approval token can be issued before product selection and carries constraints including **amount, expiry, and merchant**.
Match controls to consequences. Reversible coding work may rely on permissions and logs; payments inside a vetted network can use scoped credentials; irreversible actions across unknown parties need signed intent that merchants and processors can verify independently.
PayPal frames authorization around **three questions**: did the human approve, is the action currently within scope, and can that approval be proven later. Its approval token can be issued before product selection and carries constraints including **amount, expiry, and merchant**. Match controls to consequences. Reversible coding work may rely on permissions and logs; payments inside a vetted network can use scoped credentials; irreversible actions across unknown parties need signed intent that merchants and processors can verify independently. The highest-stakes open-ecosystem model was **not yet observed in production**. PayPal's near-term token is an opaque value only PayPal can validate, while interoperable FIDO verifiable intents and AP2 mandates remain the proposed direction.
PayPal sharpens general harness guidance into an authorization test for consequential actions: approval must be attributable to a human, valid for the current action, and provable afterward. Amount, merchant, and expiry constraints make that test concrete for payments and show why logs alone are insufficient across unknown parties. The distinction between PayPal’s closed-network token and proposed interoperable mandates also narrows current deployment claims.