Scope Creep (Agent)

Scope creep in an AI agent context is the gradual expansion of an agent's actions or data access beyond its originally approved boundaries — through chain-of-thought reasoning that leads to increasingly broad tool use, ambiguous task descriptions that the agent interprets expansively, or accumulated delegations that compound over time. Preventing scope creep requires explicit task scoping, narrow tool permissions, and runtime monitoring that flags when agents operate outside their expected patterns.