How to Give AI Agents Scoped Cloud Permissions: 7 Platforms That Actually Enforce It

AI agents should not receive long-lived cloud credentials; instead, they should use scoped tokens to request changes through platforms that execute actions with short-lived federated identities and enforce controls before cloud APIs are reached. The recommended governance model combines five elements: temporary workload identity, pre-apply policy-as-code, a constrained catalog or platform interface, human approval for high-risk actions such as IAM, networking, data deletion, and production changes, and audit trails that attribute activity to individual agents. The comparison covers HCP Terraform, Spacelift, Pulumi, env0, AWS Service Catalog, Crossplane or ACK with Kyverno, and Qovery, distinguishing IaC tools that govern proposed plans from service catalogs and internal developer platforms that limit which actions agents can express. It argues that organizations should generally combine constrained interfaces for routine tasks with policy-gated IaC for custom infrastructure, while account-level controls such as AWS SCPs and permissions boundaries provide a final safety layer. The proposed rollout begins in ephemeral non-production environments, defines explicit blast-radius limits and denial rules, uses approval gates selectively, and measures success through zero reachable static keys, meaningful policy denials, approval quality, and complete per-agent audit attribution.

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