Policy Cascades for Governed Multi-Tenant Agent Platforms

Most agent platforms give you one configuration file and hope. When you are running agents for more than one team — or more than one customer — a single config breaks down fast. Each workspace needs its own model, its own service access, its own secrets, but someone has to guarantee that no workspace can spend more than its budget or reach a service it was never authorized to use. The answer is a policy cascade. Every setting — model, temperature, allowed services, API keys, skill availability, TTL defaults — resolves through three ordered tiers: company, repo, and workspace. A lower tier can narrow an upstream ceiling but never widen it. That single rule is what makes it safe to hand a workspace to a team without handing them the keys. How the cascade resolves Three tiers, bottom-up. The company tier sets the floor. The repo tier overrides it. The workspace tier overrides both. The resolution order is fixed for every kind of setting: Kind Company tier Repo tier Workspace tier Policy fields defaults override override Variables floor override override Skills floor override override Secrets last-resort fallback override first-resolved Notice that secrets run in reverse. A workspace-tier credential wins over the repo and company defaults, and an empty value at the workspace tier falls through to the repo. This means you set a per-customer token where it is used and fall back up the chain only when it is absent. You are never forced to duplicate credentials across every workspace. Narrow-only: the safety property The cascade is not a free-for-all override. For service access, budgets, quotas, and TTL defaults, a lower tier can only narrow what the tier above it allows. If the company grants a repo [github, slack, search] , a workspace under that repo can select a subset — [github, search] — but it cannot add linkedin . The resolve-time intersection is enforced, not advisory. This extends to per-service API surface control. Granting access to GitHub does not mean grantin