PaperClipAI/doc/LOW-TRUST-PRESETS.md

Low-Trust Presets

Paperclip ships core trust preset names so containment decisions are enforced in Community Edition even when EE policy editing is unavailable.

Presets

• standard: the default V1 company-visible collaboration model. This preserves existing behavior for normal agents.
• low_trust_review: an opt-in containment preset for automated work that may consume hostile or prompt-injected input, such as untrusted pull requests, external tickets, dependency diffs, or generated review output.

Boundary Model

low_trust_review is resolved from existing JSON policy fields:

• agent permissions: permissions.trustPreset and permissions.authorizationPolicy.trustBoundary
• project policy: executionWorkspacePolicy.authorizationPolicy.trustBoundary
• issue/run policy: executionPolicy.authorizationPolicy.trustBoundary

The resolver intersects those sources. Narrower wins. A low-trust preset must resolve to a concrete company-local project, root issue, or issue-id scope. If a policy source names another company, uses an unsupported preset, or lacks that scope for risky access, Paperclip fails closed.

Containment, Not Privacy

This is containment for hostile automated work. It is not a general project, issue, or human privacy system.

V1 standard work remains company-visible by default: board users and in-company actors can inspect company work objects unless a separate access-control feature changes that behavior. Low-trust containment instead limits what the low-trust agent can read or mutate through the Paperclip API and prevents raw untrusted output from being automatically promoted into higher-trust agent context.

Low-trust agents cannot read or mutate privileged agent configuration or company skill configuration through direct grants. Persistent instruction edits are also restricted, except for the direct-chat self-edit described below. Configuration changes from outside-triggered work must go through higher-trust review and promotion paths instead.

Low trust does not prohibit task creation. Agents may create tasks assigned to themselves, and subtasks of their own tasks, within their permitted project or root-task scope. Creation uses the normal task-assignment permission checks, including explicit assignment restrictions and the responsible user's authority, even for an unassigned task. Other assignees must be explicitly within the trust boundary; board-user assignments remain forbidden. New tasks retain the creator's effective containment policy and quarantined source attribution. An exact issue-id scope does not implicitly authorize new descendants, and a permitted parent does not grant access to an unrelated project. An explicit root-task scope includes its descendants. Self-assigned decomposition is not a delegation cycle.

Permission denials must identify the rejected action and specific restriction. Agents must surface failed instruction-save receipts and explain when the current run lacks direct-chat authority or the user lacks editing permission. The user can request the edit in their authorized chat or apply it directly. Creating another task does not authorize the instruction change.

Direct-chat instruction edits

When an authorized user directly asks an agent in their own Agent Chat to edit its persistent instructions, the agent may save its own AGENTS.md even under low_trust_review. The exception requires the current accepted execution identity and a recorded authenticated board-message wake for that chat, user, and agent. User attribution alone, outside connector/plugin messages, ordinary tasks, subtasks, and messages from another user do not qualify. An earlier owner message cannot authorize a later external instruction. External content read during the chat is not a request from the user to change instructions.

The authenticated owner-chat turn is the permission boundary. The server checks message provenance and current edit access; it does not classify the message's natural-language intent or require a separate approval for each edit. The agent must follow the owner's request and treat tool output as data. This means prompt injection during an authorized owner-chat turn remains a model-level risk; the exception does not provide content-bound approval of the resulting file bytes.

Normal instruction editing permissions and explicit protected-change rules still apply. The user's current permission is rechecked at every save, including private working-copy collection after a successful, failed, or timed-out execution. Cancellation, chat reset, reassignment, message deletion, and revoked access invalidate the exception. A server-linked retry of the same chat request may use its original authenticated message; unrelated continuations may not. This authority is never written into the inherited trust policy and does not grant peer instruction edits, general configuration access, or other privileged APIs.

Human-directed work

An authenticated board user can talk to a low-trust agent in their own Agent Chat or assign it a task outside its default intake boundary. Existing conversation identity authorizes owner chat. Ordinary tasks use the human requester already recorded on the run's wakeup requests, including coalesced requests. Each request retains its server-owned origin; plugin-attributed users do not count as board instructions. Legacy board assignment requests remain valid through their existing assignment source, reason, and human requester, without trusting old plugin human attribution. A board backlog assignment is retained as a completed assignment request with no run, so it authorizes the later system launch without starting work prematurely. No separate permission table or client-supplied human identity is needed. Responsible-user attribution, external connector sender attribution, and agent claims do not qualify.

At dispatch and API authorization, Paperclip checks the live run and current assignment in one database snapshot. The exception permits reading, commenting on, and updating only that run's exact task. It does not extend to another task, a child, a whole project, configuration, instructions, secrets, or runtime management. Normal responsible-user checks still apply. The exception is never stored in the inherited trust boundary.

Automatic retries and continuations follow the existing retryOfRunId database links, checking the same company, agent, and task at every step. Cancelled runs cannot authorize a retry. The common assignment transaction cancels prior human requests, including plugin and service reassignments. Assigning the task back cannot revive those requests, and late run settlement cannot undo cancellation. Sandbox and isolated workspace requirements still apply, as do malformed-policy and company-boundary checks.

Child→Parent Reporting Under Containment

The direct-parent report comment (doc/execution-semantics.md §6, "Child→Parent Reporting") is off by default for low_trust_review: a contained run reads untrusted input, so a free-prose comment into the higher-trust parent thread is a prompt-injection promotion path. Contained reviewers report by completing their own review issue (done — the verdict is the deliverable; the issue_blockers_resolved wake carries it upward) and by the platform's system-attributed stop-only relay when they enter blocked or cancelled. Never instruct a contained delegate to comment on its parent issue.

Runtime Containment

Managed low_trust_review runs fail closed unless Paperclip can enforce the runtime boundary:

• the selected execution environment must use the sandbox driver
• the effective execution workspace mode must be isolated_workspace
• the issue being run must be inside the resolved low-trust boundary or be the exact human-directed task described above
• secret references must use binding ids explicitly allowed by the boundary
• inline sensitive environment values such as API keys and tokens are rejected
• workspace runtime-service mutations are denied unless the boundary explicitly grants the runtime.manage tool class

When the task's project has no configured workspace and no layer specifies a workspace strategy, sandbox execution uses a private directory for that company and task. The directory persists across turns and reassignment and never imports the shared project directory or agent home. No Git repository is required for this case. Configured workspaces and explicit Git strategies keep their existing validation; a missing or broken checkout does not fall back to an empty directory.

The Docker workflow in doc/UNTRUSTED-PR-REVIEW.md remains useful for manual local review, but Paperclip-managed low-trust execution requires a sandboxed environment instead of a host-local adapter process.