
AtlaSent MCP Server
io.github.AtlaSentv2.17.4Updated Oct 6, 2026
AtlaSent for AI agents: with an API key, actions wait for approval with signed proof. No key: demo.
Overview
Lets an AI agent request authorization before risky actions, verify a permit at execution time, and look up canonical action types.
- What it does
- Exposes AtlaSent authorization primitives as MCP tools: evaluate proposes an action and returns allow, deny or hold with an optional permit; verify_permit checks a permit at the execution boundary; deploy_service demonstrates the full authorize-then-verify path; atlasent_lookup_action resolves plain-language descriptions to Canon action types; atlasent_evidence_gap_report scans CI workflow files for ungoverned deploy steps; atlasent_integrity_audit and permit/decision lookups read hosted records. MCP prompts guide the flow but are not enforcement.
- When to use it
- Use it when an agent's tool calls change real systems — production deploys, data exports, access grants — and you want a decision and a verifiable permit before the effect runs. Also useful for auditing which CI steps are ungoverned. Local mode is a credential-free demo, not a protection boundary.
- Requirements
- Runs locally over stdio via npx @atlasent/mcp-server. No account needed for local mode. Remote mode needs ATLASENT_API_KEY from an AtlaSent account; ATLASENT_BASE_URL is optional and defaults to the hosted endpoint. ATLASENT_MODE selects remote or local. Some tools are hosted-mode only. Network access is required in remote mode.
Installation
In SourceWeft
- Open AtlaSent MCP Server in the dashboard and add it to a workspace.
- Enable the server for the chats that should use its tools.
Desktop only via STDIO. STDIO servers start a local process, so they need the SourceWeft desktop host.
Other MCP clients
Follow the launch instructions in the repository.
README
@atlasent/mcp-server
MCP server that enforces authorize-before-execute for any MCP-compatible AI agent.
It is the developer entry point to AtlaSent AI Action Protection, which Enterprise teams adopt through a design partner program.
[npm version] [CI] [License: Apache-2.0] [Glama MCP server]
AtlaSent is security and organizational authority infrastructure for consequential actions by people, software, and AI.
This MCP server brings it to AI agents (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, any MCP host). Before an agent's tool call changes a real system (a production deploy, a data export, an access grant), the agent asks AtlaSent first. With an API key (remote mode):
- Connect it to your agent with a few lines of config.
- Risky actions wait for a person to approve them. Everything else runs as normal.
- Every decision gets a signed record, including who approved it when the decision relied on an approval.
Try it in 60 seconds with no account: npx -y @atlasent/mcp-server (local mode, a demo that protects nothing).
Local blocking is free. To actually block on your own machine without an account, use MCP Gate or the Claude Code agent guard. Both are part of the free Community plan. Hosted decisions, shared policies and approvals for a team are on the AtlaSent plans.
For engineers
AtlaSent performs execution-time authorization: determine whether a specific consequential Action is authorized now, issue a bounded Permit on allow, verify that Permit at the execution Gate, and only then allow the governed native effect.
A plausible request is not organizational authority.
This MCP server exposes AtlaSent authorization primitives to Model Context Protocol hosts and includes a protected deployment demo that proves the ordering end to end.
Which authority decided?
This repository ships two packages, and one of them has two modes. All three block tool calls. Only one of the three is evidence, and the difference is not a feature list — it is who said yes.
A rule you can silently edit is configuration. A permit your organization issued, that was consumed once and can be produced later, is authority. Both stop the call; only the second answers "who authorized this?" — which is the question that arrives after an incident, not before one.
The gate says which one decided, on every decision: no_matching_rule is your local
policy, cloud_permit_consumed is an organizational permit. These reason strings are
deliberately not normalised into a generic "blocked." Do not collapse them.
The two packages point in opposite directions, which is why they are separate:
mcp-server exposes AtlaSent as MCP tools an agent calls to ask for authorization;
mcp-gate sits in front of someone else's MCP server and intercepts.
The invariant
For an enforced protected path:
Evaluation is not execution. A positive Decision is not the Gate. Permit Verification happens before the protected side effect.
Quickstart: 60 seconds, no account
You don't need an AtlaSent account or API key to try this server. With no credentials set, it runs in local mode: an in-process rules engine that works offline.
Add this to your MCP host config (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, and others; per-host file locations are below):
Then ask your agent to "deploy billing-api to production". The built-in rules deny it because it has no approvals. Ask again with an approval and it's allowed, and the server verifies the permit before the simulated deploy runs.
Built-in local rules (src/localEngine.ts):
Local permits are unsigned, so local mode is for development, CI, and trying things out. It's not a production enforcement boundary. The server refuses to fall back to local mode under NODE_ENV=production. When you're ready for signed permits, audit evidence, and your organization's own policies, switch to remote mode — get an API key.
Run from source
Run with Docker
Claude Code plugin: stop agents destroying production
packages/agent-hooks is a Claude Code plugin. Destructive
and shipping commands wait for a person: DROP TABLE, terraform destroy, volume
deletes, git push --force, production deploys. With nobody to ask, they are refused.
Everything else runs as normal. Local, no account.
"Someone at the keyboard said yes" is where it stops. The rest of this repository is the organizational version: an approver your organization named, and a permit you can prove afterwards.
Canon-backed Actions
AtlaSent does not treat every ad-hoc tool string as a new governed Action Type.
Use the Protected Action Canon for stable Action identity. Two important examples are:
For a generic AI tool invocation, use agent.tool.invoke as the public Canon-backed Action Type and carry tool-specific facts—tool name, target, environment, arguments/payload digest, resource state, and other required context—in the authorization context or binding fields supported by the selected integration path.
Use the read-only atlasent_lookup_action tool to discover Canon-backed Action Types instead of inventing a parallel taxonomy.
Authority is not Approval
Keep the concepts separate:
- Authority — standing, scoped organizational right to cause a class of change.
- Authorization — per-request determination whether this exact Action may proceed now.
- Policy — versioned conditions applied to the determination.
- Approval — verified input that may satisfy a Policy condition; not standing Authority and not the final Authorization result.
- Decision —
allow | deny | hold | escalateat the platform boundary. - Permit — bounded positive-Authorization artifact.
- Verification — execution-boundary check of the Permit and applicable bindings.
- Execution / native effect — what the underlying tool or system actually does.
- Evidence / Proof — durable evidence of the authorization and, where observed, the effect/result.
A human Approval, favorable risk signal, policy match, deployment ticket, or workflow status does not by itself become organizational Authority.
Protected-tool demo
deploy_service is intentionally small. It demonstrates a two-layer protected path:
The internal outer gate uses the Canon-backed agent.tool.invoke Action (CANON-000026 / ACT-0029) — the same public identifier documented throughout the AtlaSent ecosystem as the canonical generic AI-agent tool invocation. It previously used a legacy, uncatalogued identity, model.agent.execute_tool, which had no corresponding action_classes provisioning path in the runtime (no seed/migration anywhere creates a row with that slug) — so against a real, unmodified Atlasent org the outer gate could only ever return NO_ACTION_CLASS deny, regardless of the tool-specific inner gate's own decision. Migrating the outer gate onto agent.tool.invoke gives it the runtime's real "AI Agent Safeguard" provisioning path, which already exists for exactly this purpose. See AtlaSent/atlasent-mcp-server#121 for the full investigation and decision record.
If either Decision is non-allow or either Permit fails Verification, no deployment result is produced.
The protected-tool response includes the action-specific Verification result alongside the simulated native result:
The returned Permit has already been consumed by the execution-boundary Verification. Verifying it again should be treated as a replay, not as a step required after deployment.
Human-in-the-loop demo: hold, approve, execute, record
examples/hitl-demo.mjs shows one uninterrupted sequence against a hosted runtime and a real GitHub repository, using atlasent_governed_file_change (AI Action Protection, a design partner program):
The key must be agent-bound (console: Settings → Connect an AI agent). Use a dedicated demo repository.
The demo prints only what the tool returned or the repository showed. If a stage doesn't happen, the demo stops with FAIL at <stage> and exits 1. For example, if the org's agent.tool.invoke policy allows the change with no person involved, the demo fails at ATTEMPT rather than skipping the hold. The org's policy must require human approval. It writes hitl-demo-evidence-<ts>.json, and the permit appears in it only as a sha256.
Before presenting, run npm run demo:hitl:preflight. It's a read-only setup check: it makes GET requests only and creates no request, approval, permit or commit. The presenter run sheet, with prerequisites, console clicks and expected output, is docs/DEMO_90_SECONDS.md.
npm run demo:hitl -- --simulate rehearses the same stages offline with an in-memory runtime, repository and approver. Every line it prints starts with [SIMULATED], and it refuses any real network call. Don't present a simulated run as a live one.
Self-gating agent pattern
For an agent or MCP host that owns its own native tool boundary, the safe pattern is:
A wrapper, decorator, prompt, or MCP tool definition is not automatically a non-bypassable Gate. The enforcement claim belongs to the actual topology: the native effect must be unreachable through the claimed protected path unless required Authorization and Permit Verification succeeded.
Core tools
evaluate
Simple local/remote authorization helper for MCP hosts.
On allow, do not execute yet. Present the Permit to verify_permit at the execution boundary first.
verify_permit
Execution-boundary verification helper.
Proceed only when valid === true. Successful Verification consumes a single-use Permit where that contract applies.
deploy_service
Protected deployment demonstration. It performs the necessary Authorization and Verification internally before producing its simulated deployment result.
atlasent_evaluate / atlasent_verify_permit
Hosted V1 API-facing tools. Use the richer remote evaluation path when you need additional context beyond the small evaluate demo envelope. Verification remains an execution-boundary operation.
atlasent_lookup_action
Read-only Canon lookup for Action Types, gate flags, authorization patterns, evidence requirements, and graph relationships.
query is resolved by a deterministic, fully offline ranker over the vendored Canon (no embeddings service, no network — src/actionRetrieval.ts). The response carries a retrieval block:
The tool never invents an action type: every candidate is a Canon entry by reference, and a request the Canon cannot answer comes back as none rather than a plausible-looking slug. Context words such as emergency, weekend, or urgent are treated as policy context, not as evidence of a different action — "emergency deploy to production" still resolves to production.deploy, per LIFECYCLE.md's classification principle.
atlasent_atlas_lookup
Read-only lookup of canonical AtlaSent concepts such as Authority, Policy, Decision, Permit, Verification, Evidence, Gate, and Trust Root.
atlasent_evidence_gap_report
"Where are my deploys ungoverned?" Pass the text of your .github/workflows/*.yml files and get back every step that changes a real system (deploys, package and image publishes, database migrations, terraform/pulumi applies), each with a status:
Every gap (ungoverned or weak) carries a fix: the atlasent-action step to insert before it (with the action type that fits: production.deploy, package.release or infrastructure.change), the exact if: that binds the step to the gate's verified permit, and any change the existing gate needs (drop continue-on-error, drop a skip_gate condition, add id-token: write). When there are gaps, setup gives the sign-up link for the API key the gate needs. Apply the fix and run the report again: the step shows as bound.
Works in local mode: no API key, no network, nothing executed. gate_actions names your own gate wrappers (a composite action, say); they are reported as custom gates whose internals were not inspected. The report always lists what it cannot see (repository settings, deploys outside CI, the inside of ./deploy.sh), and a file it cannot parse is listed in parse_errors, never skipped. A clean report is not proof that nothing is ungoverned.
atlasent_integrity_audit
Read-only audit of the organization's Authority graph for internal inconsistency. Hosted mode only; the organization is derived server-side from the API key.
This is not a pass/fail health check, and the tool adds no verdict of its own. Each finding carries a three-way classification:
Read summary.audited_scope before concluding anything from an empty findings list — a short decision window is not an absence of findings. If the audit cannot complete, the server refuses rather than returning a partial report, and this tool surfaces that as an error rather than an empty report.
atlasent_get_permit / atlasent_check_permit / atlasent_get_decision
Read-only lookups of a single record. Hosted mode only.
atlasent_check_permit reads status without consuming the permit. Use it before a deferred action to catch a revocation, but it is not authorization: execute only after atlasent_verify_permit. atlasent_get_decision requires the audit:read scope; a permit's decision_id is the id to pass.
Permit tools never return the permit's token (its bearer credential) or signature. Anything a tool returns lands in the agent's context and transcript, so both fields are stripped client-side as well as by the API.
The server also exposes policy, permit, approval, evidence, compliance, and VQP tools. Use MCP tools/list for the exact tool inventory supported by the installed version.
Prompts
The server also exposes MCP Prompts: templates you can pick in your host to start the authorize-before-execute flow.
A prompt only guides the agent. It is not a Gate: an agent can ignore it. The action is protected only where a permit is verified immediately before it runs (see The invariant).
Approval workflow
Approval can be required, but resolving an Approval is not equivalent to executing the protected Action.
Approvals are made by a person in the AtlaSent console, never by an agent: this server deliberately has no tool that creates or resolves an approval. When an action is held for a person, the result carries an approval_request_id; call atlasent_await_approval with it to wait while the person decides in the console. On approval it returns a permit that must still pass atlasent_verify_permit; a rejection, expiry or timeout returns no permit and the action does not run. (Remote mode only; local mode never approves.) The protected Action must still satisfy the current authorization path and execution-boundary Verification before proceeding.
Change plans and plan changes. production.deploy, infrastructure.change, production.rollback and secret.configuration.change need a change_plan ({ operation, revision?, artifact_ref? }, with a revision and/or artifact ref). Pass it to deploy_service, evaluate or atlasent_evaluate. The server first creates a Change Brief recording exactly that plan, then evaluates with the brief id and the same plan. When the key cannot create briefs (HTTP 403) or the runtime has none (HTTP 404), the server evaluates with the plan alone and adds a notes entry. Any other brief failure blocks the evaluation. On claim, the server presents the same plan again, so a mismatch means the plan really changed. If your plan changed while you waited, pass the new plan to atlasent_await_approval as change_plan. By default the server files one linked re-request for the new plan (supersedes_approval_id set to the old approval), then waits for a person to decide it. The result shows the steps in summary, for example "plan changed from X to Y → re-request sent (approval …) → waiting → approved". With on_plan_mismatch: "use_approved", the server claims the approved plan and returns it as approved_plan; run exactly that plan. A second mismatch, a revoked or suspicious approval, or an organization policy with auto_rerequest_on_mismatch: false stops the wait with no permit. The result includes the diff and what to do next.
For action classes that require a verified actor, the runtime resolves the approval to approved_awaiting_claim and mints the permit only when the claim presents the actor's identity. The server then asks the runtime for a short-lived actor_identity.v1 for its own agent (POST /v1-agent-actor-identity, available only to an API key bound to a registered agent). The action type and environment come from the approval record, and the server claims with { actor_identity }. If that identity cannot be obtained, nothing is claimed and no permit is returned. On a runtime without that endpoint (HTTP 404), the server claims with an empty body as before and adds a note to the result.
Which agent, whose agent, which chat
Every evaluate call reports which app it came from (the MCP client's name,
e.g. claude-code or cursor) and which chat or session as
agent_session. AtlaSent stores this labelled reported by the agent host:
useful for tracing an action back to the conversation that caused it, never
used to decide anything.
- Session id: the Streamable HTTP session, else
ATLASENT_SESSION_IDif your host sets it, else a per-process id prefixedmcp-process-. - Optional
ATLASENT_RUN_IDfor a run or job id. - With an agent API key, leave
actor_idempty: AtlaSent identifies the agent and the person it acts for from the key itself, so the model never names itself.
Execution evidence
atlasent_record_execution_evaluation records an observed execution outcome after the native effect. That evidence function does not replace pre-execution Permit Verification.
Keep these statements distinct:
- an
allowDecision proves a positive authorization determination was made; - a verified Permit proves the bounded authorization artifact passed its Gate checks at that point in time;
- execution/native-effect evidence is what supports a claim that the underlying action actually occurred.
Local vs remote mode
Get an API key
- Create a free account at console.atlasent.io/auth/sign-up.
- Choose Connect an AI agent (also under Settings → API Keys). Name the agent, pick your app (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, …) and the console gives you a key plus the exact command or JSON to paste.
- Paste it into your MCP host config.
ATLASENT_API_KEYon its own switches the server to remote mode;ATLASENT_BASE_URLis optional and defaults to the hosted API. - Ask your agent to try something consequential (for example, "deploy the api service to production"). The console shows the decision, and anything that needs approval waits in the approval queue until someone approves it.
Remote mode gives you what local mode cannot: Ed25519-signed, single-use permits, your organization's own policies, and a tamper-evident audit trail.
Remote example:
ATLASENT_BASE_URL defaults to https://api.atlasent.io/functions/v1 — this is the
correct base for the core evaluate / verify_permit / atlasent_evaluate path and
for other dash-form direct endpoints (/v1-evaluate, /v1-verify-permit,
/v1-authority-intelligence/...). The generic REST tools (policies, permits, audit
events, webhooks, SCIM, SIEM, evidence exports, approval requests) are served at the
gateway/API domain root under slash-form paths (/v1/policies, /v1/permits, ...);
the server automatically strips the /functions/v1 suffix for those calls, so a
single ATLASENT_BASE_URL value works for both families — no separate configuration
needed.
ATLASENT_FUNCTION_REGION controls where the runtime's edge functions execute.
Unset, calls to the hosted runtime run in us-west-1, next to its database. A
self-hosted base URL is left to Supabase's nearest-region default. Set it to a
region id to pin elsewhere, or to auto to disable pinning. Execution next to
the database matters: evaluate makes dozens of sequential database round trips.
Read-only mode for live demos
Set:
to prevent registration of mutating administrative tools during a live-API demo. Read-only mode does not turn the server into a universal security boundary; it reduces the exposed mutation surface. The protected execution path still depends on the Authorization and Verification topology described above.
Fail-closed behavior
For a path that is configured to require AtlaSent Authorization and Permit Verification, treat these as block conditions:
- non-allow Decision;
- missing required Permit;
- authentication/API failure;
- invalid, expired, revoked, replayed, or binding-mismatched Permit;
- Verification error;
- missing required execution binding.
Shadow/advisory evaluation is useful for observation, but it is not the same as enforced execution protection.
Claude Desktop
Add to claude_desktop_config.json. A ready-made file with remote, local, and HTTP variants is in examples/claude_desktop_config.json.
Claude Code
Add the server with claude mcp add. It runs over stdio. Everything after -- is the command Claude Code starts:
Run claude mcp list to check it connects, or /mcp inside a Claude Code session to see its tools.
Scope. --scope (-s) controls where the entry is stored:
writes this .mcp.json:
Don't commit an API key in a project-scope .mcp.json. For remote mode, use local or user scope.
Remote mode. Set ATLASENT_API_KEY. A key on its own switches the server to remote mode, and ATLASENT_BASE_URL defaults to https://api.atlasent.io/functions/v1. ATLASENT_MODE=remote makes the choice explicit, and ATLASENT_MODE=local forces local mode even when a key is set. See Local vs remote mode.
To switch modes, remove the entry with claude mcp remove atlasent and add it again.
Cursor
Add to .cursor/mcp.json (project) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (global). A local-mode file you can copy as-is, no account needed: examples/cursor_mcp.json.
Windsurf
Add to ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json. A local-mode file you can copy as-is, no account needed: examples/windsurf_mcp_config.json.
VS Code
Add to .vscode/mcp.json in your workspace. VS Code's top-level key is servers, not mcpServers. A local-mode file you can copy as-is, no account needed: examples/vscode_mcp.json.
For remote mode, replace the env block with the one shown in the Cursor section.
Other MCP clients
The same server can be configured in any other MCP-compatible host using its normal MCP server configuration mechanism (command: npx, args: ["-y", "@atlasent/mcp-server"], and the same env block shown above).
This server is also listed on Glama (built from this repo's Dockerfile; listing ownership in glama.json) and on the official MCP Registry (io.github.Atlasent/mcp-server, manifest at server.json), so a registry-aware host can discover and install it without a hand-written config block. npm run bundle builds an MCPB bundle of the same server for hosts that install from one. Where it is and isn't listed: docs/DISTRIBUTION.md.
Development
npm test runs entirely offline. Local-mode tests touch no network, and remote-mode tests mock fetch. It includes regression tests proving that the protected deployment demo produces no native result when either the outer agent-tool Permit or the action-specific deployment Permit fails Verification.
Prefer a ready-made environment? Open the repo in a dev container (VS Code, or GitHub Codespaces), and it installs and builds on create.
Community
- Questions and ideas: GitHub Discussions
- Bugs and small features: open an issue
- Bigger changes (new tools, wire-shape or fail-closed behavior): start with an RFC issue
- Want to contribute? Read CONTRIBUTING.md and look for
good first issue - Security reports: email [email protected]. See SECURITY.md. Please don't open a public issue.
Everyone taking part is expected to follow the Code of Conduct.
Security
Do not place API keys, signing material, customer secrets, or production credentials in source control. Limit authorization context to facts required by the selected policy and bindings.
Security-sensitive integrations must place the actual side effect after the required Authorization and Verification checks in control flow. Logging a Decision and then executing anyway is not enforcement.
Related public components
atlasent-sdk— language SDKsatlasent-action— GitHub Actions integrationatlasent-verify— offline evidence verifieratlasent-keys— public verification material
License
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
Source: README.md at commit 92aaeaa
Tools
0Version history
1- v2.17.4LatestOct 6, 2026


