---
title: "Role-Based Access Control for humans and agents"
description: "Modal announced Role-Based Access Control for Team and Enterprise users, enabling teams to grant agents and humans precise workspace access within Environments. Environments are workspace subdivisions with dedicated storage, apps, and limits, commonly set as dev-staging-production or per-developer. These now act as enforceable security boundaries through Restricted Environments, where workspace members are read-only by default and only explicitly assigned users or service users can deploy or manage resources. The RBAC system distinguishes human developers, AI agents, CI deployers, and external callers with recommended identities and environment access patterns, such as service users for agents and proxy auth tokens for external callers. Built on a new permissions architecture running for months, RBAC ties into Audit Logs and is the first of planned tools; future additions include spending limits and programmatic permissions."
---

# Role-Based Access Control for humans and agents

[Modal](https://yomu.fyi/company/modal) · May 27, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Modal announced Role-Based Access Control for Team and Enterprise users, enabling teams to grant agents and humans precise workspace access within Environments. Environments are workspace subdivisions with dedicated storage, apps, and limits, commonly set as dev-staging-production or per-developer. These now act as enforceable security boundaries through Restricted Environments, where workspace members are read-only by default and only explicitly assigned users or service users can deploy or manage resources. The RBAC system distinguishes human developers, AI agents, CI deployers, and external callers with recommended identities and environment access patterns, such as service users for agents and proxy auth tokens for external callers. Built on a new permissions architecture running for months, RBAC ties into Audit Logs and is the first of planned tools; future additions include spending limits and programmatic permissions.

## Context

AI agents are now not only writing code but also deploying it and managing infrastructure autonomously. Teams need ways to grant agents precise access without making that access open-ended. Modal’s existing Environments provided separation of work, but lacked enforceable security boundaries.

## Approach / What changed

Modal implemented RBAC by hardening its existing Environments into enforceable security boundaries. Each Environment can be set as Restricted, where workspace members are read-only by default and only assigned users or service users can deploy or manage resources. Different actor types (human developer, AI agent, CI deployer, external caller) are given recommended identities with specific environment access levels.

## Takeaways

- Restricted Environments make workspace members read-only by default, limiting creation and management to explicitly assigned users or service users.
- RBAC maps actor identities (human developers, AI agents, CI deployers, external callers) to specific environment access patterns and recommended identities like service users or proxy auth tokens.
- RBAC ties into Audit Logs for a complete record of actions and is the first of several planned tools, including spending limits and programmatic permissions.

## FAQ

### What is a Restricted Environment?

A Restricted Environment is a workspace subdivision where only explicitly granted users or service users can create or manage resources. Workspace members are read-only by default, and cross-environment lookups to secrets, apps, and volumes are limited to code running inside the environment.

### How does RBAC handle different types of users and agents?

RBAC distinguishes human developers, AI agents, CI deployers, and external callers with recommended identities such as Workspace User, Service User, and proxy auth token. Each type is assigned specific environment access levels, like Contributor for agents and Invoke-only for external callers via a proxy auth token.

### What is on the RBAC roadmap?

Near-term features include spending and time-based limits per agent, programmatic access to permission primitives, resource-based permissions, and making Restricted Environments the default. RBAC is the first of several planned tools on this new permissions architecture.

**Tags:** [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents), [Authorization](https://yomu.fyi/topic/authorization), [RBAC](https://yomu.fyi/topic/rbac)

- Source: [Modal](https://modal.com/blog/role-based-access-control-for-humans-and-agents)
- Source URL: https://modal.com/blog/role-based-access-control-for-humans-and-agents
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-20T07:46:52.384Z

[Read original post](https://modal.com/blog/role-based-access-control-for-humans-and-agents)