Data Flow Control: Data Safety Policies for AI Agents

Text2SQL agents powered by LLMs translate natural language intent into SQL by exploring the data system through tool calls before formulating the query. However, to ensure secure and scoped access, data systems construct environments with explicit API surfaces. We study and categorize these APIs exposed today as either coarse-grained or fine-grained and posit that choosing between them presents a fundamental tradeoff between cost-efficient exploration and accurate SQL generation. Most data systems expose fine-grained APIs, but this inadvertently disadvantages agents: they over-explore, incorporating irrelevant schema elements into their query formulation and produce inaccurate results. We argue that curbing over-exploration is key to the effective use of these API surfaces, and propose Sophrosyne, a data system environment that augments API responses with directives that guide the agent's exploration process. Initial results show that directives reduce over-exploration by 4.6x and boost accuracy by up to 12.4% (approx. 4 percentage points).

Autonomous LLM agents processing mixed-confidentiality data face severe security risks from prompt injection attacks and reasoning errors. While dynamic Information Flow Control (IFC) provides structural security guarantees, traditional taint tracking permanently taints an agent's context upon reading unvetted data, severely restricting downstream utility. We present APPA (Agentic Permissions Policy Algebra), an IFC framework that resolves this usability bottleneck through engine-managed context branching and prospective acquisition enforcement. Before data acquisition occurs, APPA prospectively evaluates label descents and missing prerequisites, generating actionable remedy plans (Authorize, Accept). To inspect unvetted data without polluting the primary context, a label-seeded child trajectory is spawned, absorbing label descent locally and allowing a trusted sanitizer to return a bounded derivative to the unchanged parent. Governed by a two-monoid model over security labels and shared event logs, we formally prove parent label preservation and merge confinement. Finally, we evaluate APPA on a multi-turn tool-chaining benchmark across four models: it suppresses exfiltration (31%-50% down to 0%-7% attack success), and on three of the four, branching recovers a substantial share of the utility that taint tracking alone forfeits.

Production data integration is bottlenecked by repeated, lossy handoffs between data owners, engineers, and analysts who must collaboratively discover, structure, and query enterprise data. We present Data Intelligence Agents (DIA), a system of three agents (Data Interpreter, Schema Creator, and Query Generator) that compresses this workflow by treating autonomous coding agents (ACAs) as a first-class abstraction: rather than emitting text, the agents generate, execute, validate, and repair concrete artifacts, draw on a shared memory for experience reuse, and surface each for review by domain experts. DIA is deployed in production for enterprise customers. We study the Query Generator in depth and evaluate it in fully autonomous mode across seven SQL benchmarks spanning four task categories and four dialects. It matches or surpasses the best published results on all seven, demonstrating that an architecture grounded in execution, built on ACAs and a shared memory, generalizes across the data intelligence workload with adaptation confined to natural-language instructions.