Language-Based Agent Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhou, Timothy, D'Antoni, Loris, Polikarpova, Nadia
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Zhou, Timothy
D'Antoni, Loris
Polikarpova, Nadia
author_facet Zhou, Timothy
D'Antoni, Loris
Polikarpova, Nadia
contents This paper introduces language-based agent control (LBAC), a new programming model for agentic applications that brings techniques from programming languages and language-based security to the problem of agent control. In conventional programming, combinations of static typing and runtime enforcement have long been used to guarantee that well-typed programs satisfy user-specified policies, including policies for access control, information flow, data provenance, and more. The key idea behind LBAC is to extend these guarantees to agentic applications by requiring agents to generate programs that are themselves well typed in the context of the surrounding scaffolding code. Unsafe programs are rejected by the type-checker before execution, allowing policies to apply uniformly across the entire application, including both agent-generated behavior and developer-written scaffolding. At the same time, LBAC preserves substantial expressiveness: agents may perform arbitrary side-effect-free computation and recursively invoke subagents, which retain full tool access subject to the same -- or potentially more restrictive -- policies. We demonstrate LBAC with three case studies: I/O sandboxing via filesystem capabilities, data provenance, and information-flow control.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12863
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language-Based Agent Control
Zhou, Timothy
D'Antoni, Loris
Polikarpova, Nadia
Programming Languages
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
This paper introduces language-based agent control (LBAC), a new programming model for agentic applications that brings techniques from programming languages and language-based security to the problem of agent control. In conventional programming, combinations of static typing and runtime enforcement have long been used to guarantee that well-typed programs satisfy user-specified policies, including policies for access control, information flow, data provenance, and more. The key idea behind LBAC is to extend these guarantees to agentic applications by requiring agents to generate programs that are themselves well typed in the context of the surrounding scaffolding code. Unsafe programs are rejected by the type-checker before execution, allowing policies to apply uniformly across the entire application, including both agent-generated behavior and developer-written scaffolding. At the same time, LBAC preserves substantial expressiveness: agents may perform arbitrary side-effect-free computation and recursively invoke subagents, which retain full tool access subject to the same -- or potentially more restrictive -- policies. We demonstrate LBAC with three case studies: I/O sandboxing via filesystem capabilities, data provenance, and information-flow control.
title Language-Based Agent Control
topic Programming Languages
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12863