How do you balance agent quality with data privacy?

Agents get better with more context. But more context means more data exposure. This creates a genuine tension — not a problem to solve once, but a trade-off to manage continuously.

The first question: do your agents see only what they need for the task at hand, or do they have broad access because it’s easier to set up? The difference between scoped and unscoped access is the difference between a managed risk and a liability waiting to happen.

The second question: where does that data go? An open-source model running on your infrastructure has a fundamentally different privacy calculus than a frontier model behind an API. Both can be the right choice — but the data governance implications are different.

The practical approach: treat context access like a permission system. Agents get the minimum context needed for the current task, scoped to the authority of the user who delegated, revoked when the task is done. This is the same zero-authority principle applied to information access rather than action authority.