AI engineering glossary · Evals guardrails AI security
What is least privilege?
Least privilege (also called principle of least privilege): The principle that a user, program or AI agent should have only the minimum access needed for its task and nothing more. It limits damage from mistakes or hijacking, for example by giving an agent read-only database access unless writes are essential.
Least privilege: an example
A reporting assistant gets a database account that can only run SELECT queries on two tables.
Related terms
More Evals guardrails AI security terms
- Llama Guard
- LLM-as-a-judge
- lm-evaluation-harness
- Many-shot jailbreaking
- Membership inference attack
- Misinformation risk
- MITRE ATLAS
- MMLU
Where you learn it
Least privilege is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.