Revoke an agent's access

Revoking an agent’s key is one command. Knowing what it does not reach is the part worth reading before you need it.

Find the key first, if you only know the agent

Revocation acts on a key id. If what you have is an agent — a name in the inventory, or a record Anectico discovered for you — ask which credential produced its telemetry. In the product this is Govern → Inventory → Attribution on the agent’s row (See every agent that is running); over the API it is:

GET /api/v1/assets/{assetId}/attribution

Every mapping in the response carries a credentials list naming the API keys seen producing that agent’s telemetry, with a first- and last-seen window and a sighting count, so a key used once and a key on today’s hot path are distinguishable before you act. Feed the api_key_id you find to the revoke command below.

Two answers there are not keys, and both are useful rather than dead ends. bearer_token means a signed-in person’s session produced the telemetry — there is no key to revoke, and the control is that person’s access. dev_org_header means a development-only trust setting accepted it with no credential at all; nothing can revoke that, and seeing it outside development means the setting is on where it should not be.

An empty list means nothing was recorded for that agent, which is not the same as “it used no credential” — see the attribution response.

Revoke

anectico apikey list
anectico apikey revoke <key-id> --yes

anectico apikey list shows every key’s id, name, status, project binding, expiry and last used — which is how you find the right one when several agents share a workspace. The SCOPES column is truncated to keep the table readable; audit a key’s real grant with anectico apikey list -o json.

In the product, the same thing lives under Settings → Access.

Revocation is permanent. A revoked key cannot be un-revoked; replacing it means minting a new one. Revoking requires api_key:write, so it is not something an investigating agent’s own key can do to itself or to another.

What stops immediately

Every new request. Anectico re-checks the key against its authoritative record on every request — there is no cached credential and nothing to expire out of a cache — so a revoked key starts failing at once, everywhere, across the MCP endpoint, the REST API and the CLI alike.

What the agent sees is a plain 401 with the generic body {"error":"unauthorized","message":"authentication required"}. It is deliberately the same answer a malformed, unknown or expired key gets: the endpoint will not confirm that a key it rejects ever existed, so the response cannot be used to probe which credentials are real. That means the 401 alone will not tell you why — check the key’s status with anectico apikey list rather than reading the failure.

Every outstanding confirm token. A preview’s confirm_token is bound to the credential that previewed. Once that credential cannot authenticate, the second call never runs, so nothing previewed and not yet applied can be applied afterwards. (The token would have expired within 10 minutes regardless.)

Every idempotency replay. The ~10-minute window in which a retried call replays its first result is keyed to the same credential and is equally unreachable.

What finishes rather than stopping

Be exact here rather than reassuring.

A short request that has already authenticated is not torn down. Revocation is a decision about future authentication. A request that got past the door before you revoked keeps the authorization it was admitted with, and that authorization is not re-checked against the revocation while the request runs. It is not a promise that the request succeeds — it can still fail, time out, or be cancelled — only that revoking is not what stops it.

Anything still delivering data when you revoke is the exception, and it does stop. Three things can still be sending after minutes: a download of an export’s contents; a live stream — the log tail behind Explore → Logs → Live, anectico logs tail, and /api/v1/stream/logs, plus a live investigation; and an A2A streaming call, either a SendStreamingMessage still working through an investigation or a SubscribeToTask following one. All of them re-check the credential while they run instead of re-reading the authorization they began with. For a key that means its current key record; for a signed-in person it means that exact sign-in session plus the person’s current membership. Revoking either stops them:

Still running when you revoke	It stops within
An export download	a few seconds
A live log tail or investigation stream	30 seconds
An A2A SendStreamingMessage or SubscribeToTask	30 seconds of its next update

Narrowing a key’s scopes stops all three the same way, and so does freezing the key. A role downgrade does the same to a signed-in person’s stream when it removes anything the stream was admitted with.

SubscribeToTask is the one worth naming separately, because it is the only call here with no natural end: it opens with the task’s current snapshot and then follows newly committed updates for as long as the caller stays connected. It is bounded by the same 30 seconds as everything else.

The “of its next update” in that row is exact rather than a hedge. An A2A stream is re-checked when it has something to hand over, so a stream sitting idle mid-investigation is not interrupted the moment you revoke — but it also delivers nothing while it sits there, and the next thing it would deliver is refused instead. Nothing produced more than 30 seconds after the revocation reaches the caller.

What the client sees is deliberately blunt. A download ends as a file shorter than the length it was promised, which every HTTP client treats as a failed download. A stream ends with a final event naming the reason — unauthorized when the credential no longer authenticates, forbidden when it no longer holds the permission the stream needs — and marked as final, so a client stops rather than reconnecting against a dead key. Once a response has started there is no way to turn it back into a refusal, and a truncated answer is better than a complete one the caller may no longer have.

An A2A stream says the same three things in its own protocol, as a final JSON-RPC error in place of the next update: UNAUTHENTICATED when the key no longer authenticates, UNAUTHORIZED when it still authenticates but no longer holds what the stream was admitted with, and a server error when the key could not be checked at all. Only the first is ambiguous between “your credential expired” and “your credential was taken away” — A2A has one code for both — so the message says which, and an agent holding a revoked key is told to obtain a new credential rather than to retry with that one.

A signed-in person’s live stream has the same bound. Each sign-in is a separate session, so signing out one device stops that device’s live work without killing the person’s other signed-in devices. Removing the person’s membership, expiring that session, or signing it out is final for that stream. A role downgrade is checked against the current membership rather than the role copied into the authorization at sign-in.

An authorization merely reaching its routine expiry is different: the session can still be live, and the browser can renew it. In that case the stream ends without being marked final, the dashboard signs the person back in, and it resumes where it left off. An A2A caller is told to re-authenticate and call again. A session that was signed out or removed is marked final instead; presenting the same session again cannot repair it.

An export already commissioned still gets produced. An export job records the scopes it needs at creation time and runs on its own schedule, so revoking the key does not stop the file being written. Downloading it is a different question, and the answer is better: the download address is an Anectico API path that re-authorizes on every request rather than a link carrying its own authority, so possessing the address grants nothing, the revoked key cannot fetch the result, and a fetch already in progress is cut off rather than allowed to finish. Because a key-created job records the key as its creator, after revocation only an organization owner or admin can download it. Completed results remain downloadable for 24 hours.

If a running export is itself the thing you want stopped, cancel it before you revoke — cancel_export_job works on a pending, running or retrying job, and a canceled job cannot be resumed.

What revocation cannot take back

Anything that already left Anectico. An action with effect_scope: external caused something outside your workspace that no credential change retracts: a ticket filed or closed in your tracker, an invitation emailed, a test message delivered to a real channel, an incident that paged every enabled channel. Ask the server for the complete current list rather than trusting a fixed one here:

{"name": "list_write_actions", "arguments": {"effect_scope": "external"}}

Anything already deleted. delete_log and delete_trace are durable deletions. Nothing restores them, and neither does revoking the key that ran them.

Anything already read. Data the agent retrieved is in its context, its transcript, and possibly its host’s logs. Revocation ends future access; it does not un-read a person’s profile properties or an agent-run transcript. If the concern is what was read rather than what was changed, the control that mattered was the scope the key was minted with — see Scope recipes for agent jobs.

Anything a notification already carried. A message delivered to Slack, an email, or a webhook went to a destination with no permissions of its own. Narrowing or removing a credential does not change what was delivered; change the alert rule that feeds the destination.

Contain an agent

Revoking a key you already found, above, is the right tool when one credential needs to stop and you are the one person that decision needs. Quarantine is the tool for the rest: you want to stop writes without losing the ability to bring the agent straight back, you want to act on an asset or an undeclared agent rather than a key id you’ve already looked up, or your organization requires that disabling a production credential is never a one-person decision.

In the product, containment lives at Govern → Containment. Requesting and approving are two separate controls there, and the page refuses to offer you the approval of a request you raised yourself.

It always takes two people

A containment is two acts by two different principals. Requesting asks for it and does nothing else — no credential is touched by a request alone. Approving is the act that actually disables something, and the platform refuses to let the same principal do both: the database itself rejects an approval whose approver matches its own requester, so this cannot be worked around by a script or an automation running under one shared credential.

quarantine:request is granted to every role except viewer, deliberately — sounding the alarm should not require finding an admin first. quarantine:approve is owner/admin-only, because approving is what disables a production credential; the same scope is required to lift a containment afterward. Withdrawing a request nobody approved is the one act that sits with the requester: see Withdraw a request nobody approved. See Permission scopes for both.

Three actions, and what each one actually does

Action	What it does	Reversible?
freeze_writes (default)	Strips every write-shaped scope from each credential involved, keeping only the scopes that end :read. The original scope set is stashed so a lift restores it exactly.	Yes — the only reversible action
revoke_credentials	Revokes each credential outright — the same durable revocation described above.	No. There is no un-revoke
kill	Freezes and then permanently revokes every credential in the approved set. When the target resolves to an agent asset, it also installs a standing ban on minting a declared credential for that agent; a direct API-key target has no agent on which to install that ban.	Only the freeze half; the ban lifts with the containment

Read freeze_writes literally: it removes every scope that is not read-shaped. A typical SDK ingest key holds only ingest:write and nothing else, so freezing it reduces that key to zero scopes. A frozen ingest key’s telemetry stops arriving. That is the point of freezing an agent’s telemetry credential, not a side effect to route around — if you need the agent’s data to keep flowing while you investigate, freezing that key is the wrong action.

revoke_credentials calls the exact same durable revoke as the CLI command above — same 401 on the very next request, same permanence. Everything in What stops immediately, What finishes rather than stopping, and What revocation cannot take back is equally true of a quarantine that revokes.

kill and its third clause — read this before you rely on it

kill also stops a new key being minted for the agent, but only for keys that say which agent they are for.

A key can be minted with a declaration: the id of the agent it is being created for. Pass --agent to anectico agent bootstrap or anectico apikey create, or send "agent_asset_id" in the body of POST /api/v1/account/api-keys. A declared key gets two things an undeclared one does not:

• while a kill containment is live on that agent, minting another key for it is refused — a 400 whose details.reason is AGENT_MINT_BANNED and whose details.asset_id names the agent, so you can find the containment that refused you;
• a containment can reach it before it has ever been used. Anectico normally learns which key belongs to which agent by watching telemetry, so a key you minted and have not deployed yet is invisible to that. A declared key is not.

The declaration has to name a real agent in the same project as the key. An id that matches nothing, one belonging to another project, or one naming something that is not an agent is refused with a 400 before any key is created — so a declaration is a fact about your inventory rather than a string you typed. Two consequences worth planning around: declare an agent only once it appears in anectico fleet list (a brand-new agent has no id until its first telemetry arrives, which is why anectico agent bootstrap warns rather than refusing when --agent is omitted), and an org-wide key cannot carry a declaration at all, because an agent belongs to exactly one project.

A key minted for that agent while the kill is being applied does not slip through. The ban and the list of keys it acts on are taken as one act, so a mint either lands before the ban — in which case the same kill revokes it, and its row in the containment says credential_minted_during_kill — or it arrives after and is refused.

A key that declares no agent is outside both. Anybody in your organization who can create API keys can still create a plain one and give it to the agent you killed, and nothing refuses that mint. The first telemetry from that key supplies the missing link: Anectico then raises a critical review signal naming the non-secret key id, the killed agent, the active containment, and the first and latest sighting times. It raises one row per key and containment, not one per span.

That signal appears in the review queue, sends opening and clearing notifications, and can be targeted by an alert rule using the review_signals source. It contains nothing and revokes nothing; a person still decides whether to revoke the key. Repeated sightings do not send another opening. Revoking it or lifting the named containment closes the row. The window before first telemetry remains real, so if your recovery plan depends on “nobody can re-provision this agent”, the process control is still yours: mint agent keys with --agent so the ban can bind, and treat api_key:write as the permission that can undo a containment.

Every kill tells you which case you are in. Its enforcement points include one for the mint path:

What you see	What it means
mint_ban_declared_only	The ban is in force for keys that declare this agent. It cannot stop an undeclared key.
mint_ban_no_asset	No ban was installed at all — the containment named an API key directly, or an agent Anectico has not yet built an inventory entry for.
enforcement_failed	The ban could not be installed. Re-enforce the containment — do not lift it.

Lifting the containment restores minting. If two containments name the same agent, both have to be lifted — and the lift tells you when the ban survives because another one still holds it. A lift of a containment whose ban was never installed says nothing_to_restore rather than quarantine_lifted, so the record keeps saying that the third clause was never in force.

The inventory lifecycle follows the same cover-set rule. Two different targets can resolve to the same agent; lifting either one leaves that agent quarantined while the other containment is active, and the last lift restores the lifecycle state the agent had before the first containment began.

If a lift fails partway, run it again. Lifting is idempotent: a repeated lift on a containment that has already been released finishes whatever the first attempt did not, rather than refusing you. Retrying is always the right first move.

If part of a containment failed, re-enforce it

A containment is recorded before anything is applied, so an approval can succeed while one of its effects does not — a credential that could not be reached, or a mint ban that could not be installed. The containment then reads active with a failed row inside it, which is the truth and not a bug.

Do not lift it to fix it. Lifting restores the credentials and re-opens the mint path, which for a kill re-opens the agent in order to repair the thing that was meant to keep it shut. Re-enforce instead:

curl --fail-with-body \
  -X POST \
  -H "X-Anectico-API-Key: $ANECTICO_API_KEY" \
  "https://app.anectico.com/api/v1/quarantines/$QUARANTINE_ID/reenforce"

It re-runs only what is recorded as failed, under the approval the two principals already made — it approves nothing new and needs no second person. retried in the response says how many things were re-attempted; 0 means there was nothing left to repair, which is a success rather than an error. It takes the same permission as approving and lifting.

What a containment names

A target is one of three things, not always a key you already hold:

• an asset id, if the agent is in your inventory — resolves to every credential that has produced that asset’s telemetry
• an observation key, for an agent nobody declared — the attribution lookup above returns this
• an API key id directly, when you already know exactly which credential to stop

The request body must supply exactly one of asset_id, observation_key, or api_key_id. Supplying none or supplying several is a 400; Anectico never chooses one by priority. action may be omitted, in which case it defaults to freeze_writes. If it is present, it must name freeze_writes, revoke_credentials, or kill; a blank or unknown spelling is a 400 and creates no containment request.

An API key id is checked against your organization’s keys when the containment is approved, and against the project the containment is scoped to. A well-formed id that names no key of yours — one wrong character, a key belonging to somebody else, or one belonging to a different project of your own — is refused at that point with a 404, rather than producing a containment that reports success over a credential it should not reach. Revoking is permanent, so this check runs before the approval is signed. A key created with org_wide belongs to no project and stays reachable from any of them. The same rules apply to an asset id outside the scope you named.

Request, approve, verify, lift

# 1. Request — any member or developer can raise this
curl --fail-with-body \
  -X POST \
  -H "X-Anectico-API-Key: $ANECTICO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "https://app.anectico.com/api/v1/quarantines" \
  --data '{
    "asset_id": "asset_9f2c...",
    "action": "freeze_writes",
    "reason": "Agent is retrying a failing tool call in a tight loop"
  }'

A successful request answers 201. Its quarantine.quarantine_id is what the next three calls act on, and quarantine.status reads "pending" — nothing has been enforced yet.

request_id is yours to choose, and re-sending the same one returns your existing request instead of opening a second containment. It is scoped to the person who used it first: if somebody else in your organization already used that id, you get a 409 telling you the id is taken — and nothing about their request. Two people running the same runbook need two ids, or one of them will be told to pick another.

# 2. Approve — a DIFFERENT principal, holding quarantine:approve. Reusing the
# requester's own key here is refused: the platform can tell from the credential
# that made the request, and rejects an approval that would make the two-person
# rule a formality.
curl --fail-with-body \
  -X POST \
  -H "X-Anectico-API-Key: $ANECTICO_APPROVER_API_KEY" \
  "https://app.anectico.com/api/v1/quarantines/$QUARANTINE_ID/approve"

# 3. Verify — check what actually happened
curl --fail-with-body \
  -H "X-Anectico-API-Key: $ANECTICO_APPROVER_API_KEY" \
  "https://app.anectico.com/api/v1/quarantines/$QUARANTINE_ID"

# 4. Lift — when the incident is over
curl --fail-with-body \
  -X POST \
  -H "X-Anectico-API-Key: $ANECTICO_APPROVER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "https://app.anectico.com/api/v1/quarantines/$QUARANTINE_ID/lift" \
  --data '{"reason": "Root cause fixed, agent redeployed with a corrected retry budget"}'

Lifting also takes quarantine:approve — restoring capability to an agent someone decided to stop is treated as the same grade of decision as stopping it in the first place. A lift restores whatever a freeze reduced. It does not undo a revoke: see Three actions above, and mint a replacement credential the normal way once you’ve lifted.

A lift frees only what no other containment is still holding. One key often serves several agents, so two containments raised against two different agents can land on the same credential. Lifting one of them leaves that shared credential frozen while the other is still active, and says so: the credential appears under quarantine.credentials with detail_code held_by_another_quarantine. Lift the other containment and the credential comes back — whichever lift is the last to let go is the one that restores it. Without that rule, lifting the first containment would hand the agent its capability back while the second one still reported it contained.

Two people lifting two overlapping containments at the same moment is safe. Whichever of the two ends up last still releases the shared credential, so simultaneous lifts cannot leave an agent frozen by a containment that no longer exists.

To see everything currently open or historical, GET /api/v1/quarantines?status=pending (repeat status for more than one value) lists across your organization, newest first.

Withdraw a request nobody approved

Not every request should end in a containment. An alarm raised on a hunch that turns out to be a deploy, a runbook fired twice, a request overtaken by the agent being taken offline anyway — all leave a pending row, and a pending row is not inert: while a containment is pending, no second one can be raised against the same agent. Leaving it there means the next person who genuinely needs to contain that agent is refused.

curl --fail-with-body \
  -X POST \
  -H "X-Anectico-API-Key: $ANECTICO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "https://app.anectico.com/api/v1/quarantines/$QUARANTINE_ID/withdraw" \
  --data '{"reason": "The retry storm was a bad deploy, not the agent"}'

Withdrawing your own request takes only quarantine:request — the scope you used to raise it. That is deliberate and it is the one place the two containment scopes are not symmetric: a pending request has enforced nothing, so retracting it hands capability back to nobody, which is the thing quarantine:approve is owner/admin-only to protect. Requiring an admin to clear a row that never had an effect is how such rows come to be left alone.

Withdrawing somebody else’s takes quarantine:approve. Retracting another person’s request suppresses a containment before a second principal has had the chance to consider it, which is the same decision as refusing one.

Three things to expect:

• A withdrawal reaches no credential, because a pending request never touched one. Nothing is frozen, released, revoked or restored by it.
• It only works on a pending request. An approved containment is ended with a lift, which restores credentials; a withdrawal on anything else is refused with 400.
• The withdrawn request keeps its request_id, and re-sending that id returns the withdrawn record rather than opening a new containment. Raising the request again means choosing a new request_id.

Like a lift, a withdrawal requires a reason, and the record stays: status reads "withdrawn", with withdrawn_by, withdrawn_at and withdraw_reason. “Somebody asked to stop this agent and then thought better of it” is a fact an incident review wants, and deleting the row would lose it.

Reading the status

quarantine.status is "pending" (requested, nothing enforced), "active" (approved and enforced), "lifted" (released after having been enforced — the record stays, because “this agent was stopped for six hours last Tuesday” is exactly the fact an incident review needs), or "withdrawn" (retracted before anyone approved it, so it was never enforced at all).

"lifted" and "withdrawn" are separate on purpose. Both are endings, and they say opposite things: one agent was stopped and let go, the other was never stopped. A count of your containments should not include the ones that never happened.

A quarantine that has ended also carries why: lift_reason on a lifted one, withdraw_reason on a withdrawn one, beside the lifted_by/lifted_at and withdrawn_by/withdrawn_at pair.

Each credential a quarantine resolved to is reported individually, under quarantine.credentials, with its own state — one containment can legitimately freeze one key and find a second already revoked, and a single rolled-up answer would misreport the pair. verified means the platform’s own credential store now denies the credential on its very next request — that is a fact about the credential, not a promise that no more telemetry has arrived, because confirming an absence would mean waiting and guessing how long is long enough.

unknown is not a failure — it is an honest answer to a question containment cannot always fully close. You will see it when:

• some of the target’s recorded telemetry carried no credential the platform can revoke at all — a signed-in person’s dashboard session, or a sighting recorded before this feature existed to track which credential produced it
• the target resolved to no credentials at all, in which case reporting verified would claim to have revoked nothing while sounding like containment succeeded
• a credential this containment named was already frozen by an earlier one, so this containment changed nothing about it (detail_code already_contained). The credential is contained — and it stays contained until every containment naming it has been lifted — but the effect belongs to the earlier one, and claiming it here would be this containment taking credit for another’s work
• the credential no longer exists in your organization (detail_code no_such_credential), which is a different fact from having contained it

quarantine.unenforceable_sightings tells you how many sightings fall into the first case. A non-zero count is not a bug report: it means some of what this agent did did not arrive on anything the platform can take away, and the honest status for that is unknown, never a false verified.

A contained key cannot be edited around

While a key is frozen, its scopes cannot be changed by the ordinary key-editing route: a PATCH /api/v1/account/api-keys/{id} that carries scopes is refused with a 400 whose message names the containment. Renaming still works.

This is deliberate, and it matters because the two authorities differ. Editing a key’s scopes is something every member and developer can do; approving and lifting a containment is owner/admin only. Without the refusal, anyone who could edit a key could hand a stopped agent its write scope back on the next request — with nothing linking that act to the containment somebody else approved. It also keeps the lift honest: the original scope set is stashed when the freeze happens, so a change made while frozen would either be overwritten by the lift or, worse, silently re-granted by it. Lift the containment first, then edit.

A frozen key is visible as frozen. GET /api/v1/account/api-keys reports frozen: true with a frozen_at timestamp for every contained key, so a key whose scope list has shrunk is explained rather than mysterious. It is not the same as revoked: a frozen key still authenticates, and a revoked one is gone for good.

Review what the agent did

Read the trail under Settings → Audit, which needs audit:read — a scope owners and admins hold. Filter by resource, by action, or by result.

Every mutation that reached its handler is there, and not only the ones that worked. Each record’s result is one of:

Result	What it means	Did anything change?
success	The change was applied	Yes
denied	Refused — scope, confirmation, or policy	No
previewed	A confirm-gated call returned a preview and stopped	No
throttled	The write budget refused the call	No
error	The call reached the change and failed, or ended by an unknown path	Unknown — cross-check
unknown	The platform could not classify the outcome	Unknown — cross-check

Alongside the result each record carries the resource, the action, the tool name, and the affected object. Filtering on denied is usually where a review starts: a denied beside a previewed beside a throttled is the shape of an agent trying things it was not scoped for.

unknown never means success. It means the platform declined to guess, which it does rather than record an outcome it cannot vouch for — an empty list of refusals must mean there were none, not that the question could not be answered.

Who gave this agent its access, and when

Reviewing what an agent did is half the question. The other half is what it was ever allowed to do, and who decided that:

GET /api/v1/account/audit-events?target_api_key_id={id}

That returns the key’s whole grant history and nothing else — issued, scopes changed, revoked, newest first. It matches the key that was changed, never the key that did the changing, so a key used to administer other keys does not collect their history.

Every one of those records carries the scope set in metadata:

• scopes — what stands after the act. On the issue it is what was granted; on the revocation it is what the credential could do at the moment it stopped working, which nothing can tell you afterwards. An empty value means nothing was granted, which is different from the field being absent.
• previous_scopes — the set a change replaced, present only on a scope change. A rename replaces nothing and carries neither, so a record with both is always a real widening or narrowing.

event_type narrows it further — api_key_created, api_key_updated, api_key_revoked — and composes with the key filter, so “every time this agent’s scopes changed” is one request.

The key listing itself answers who issued the credential: user_id for a person, created_by_api_key_id when a key issued a key, and created_by_state saying which of those applies so an empty user_id is never ambiguous. orphaned_user there means a person issued it and their record is no longer available — the attribution was lost, and the record says so rather than looking like a key nobody issued.

Revocations always name their actor. A key revoked because its project or organization was deleted records the platform as the actor and names the deletion under metadata.via, so a credential that stopped working without anybody touching it is explained rather than mysterious.

Two things the trail will not tell you, so plan the review around them:

• A call refused before it was dispatched is not in it. An action the key was never scoped for, or one excluded by the profile the agent connected with, is refused without running, and there is nothing to record. Absence of a record is not evidence the agent never asked.
• The record is written beside the change, not inside it. A record that fails to persist does not undo the change it describes. For anything consequential, cross-check.

The cross-check is the receipts the agent itself received. Every committed write returned the operation, the outcome, what changed, the targets the platform confirmed, and both effect_scope and destructive — so a transcript says how far each change reached without re-reading the catalog. A receipt also carries a mutation id and a commit time when the platform reported them, and leaves them null when it did not; a null there means “re-read to find out”, never “nothing happened”.

Rotate instead, when nothing is wrong

If the key is simply old or over-scoped, replace before you revoke so the agent never loses its footing:

anectico agent bootstrap --project <project-id> --host claude --scope-profile investigate
eval "$(anectico agent key env --export)"
anectico apikey revoke <old-key-id> --yes

Re-bootstrapping the same profile replaces the stored secret and the anectico entry in the host’s MCP configuration rather than accumulating a second one; every other entry in that file is written back untouched.

Two habits make this rarely urgent:

• Give every key an expiry. anectico agent bootstrap defaults to 30 days, and --expires-in accepts anything up to 365 days. An expired key fails exactly like a revoked one.
• One key per purpose. A developer’s local agent, CI, a shared support workflow and production operations should not share a credential — otherwise revoking one of them takes down all four, and the audit trail cannot tell them apart.

Withdraw a delegation, without touching the credential

Revoking a key stops a credential. Withdrawing a delegation records that one authority relationship should no longer exist — “this agent may no longer act through that tool for that purpose” — and leaves the key alone.

The two are different acts and you often want both, in that order. A delegation is identified by an edge id from the authority graph:

GET  /api/v1/authority-edges?from_principal={principal}
POST /api/v1/authority-edges/{edgeId}/revoke

The POST body carries one field, reason, and it is required — a withdrawal that records who and when and nothing about why is the one a reviewer six months later cannot act on. Requires agents:write. Who withdrew it is taken from your credential and cannot be set in the body.

Four things are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It is not a delete. The edge stays, with its full sighting history — how often the delegation was exercised and when it last was. Withdrawing authority is not a claim that it was never used.
• It disappears from the default read. GET /api/v1/authority-edges hides withdrawn delegations, because the question that read answers is “what authority exists now”. Pass include_revoked=true to see the history.
• Repeating the call is safe. The response says already_revoked: true and returns the withdrawal that stands — the first reason and the first instant, not yours.
• Using a withdrawn delegation does not restore it. If an action later exercises it anyway, the delegation stays withdrawn and a review signal is raised for a human, visible at GET /api/v1/review-signals?status=open. A withdrawal cannot be undone by ignoring it. This records the violation; it does not stop the action — for that, revoke the credential or contain the agent.

What is not a revocation

A profile is not a revocation. Connecting with ?profile=investigate really does stop that connection invoking a mutation — but the caller chose the parameter, the key still holds every scope it was minted with, and the next connection without it is served all of them again. Only revoking or re-scoping the key changes what the credential can do.

Withdrawing a delegation is not a revocation of the credential. It records that an authority relationship should not exist and makes any further use of it visible; the key still works and the agent can still act. Do both when you mean both.

Removing the MCP server from a host config is not a revocation. The secret is still valid wherever else it has been copied — the environment variable, a CI secret store, a shell history. Revoke the key.

• How agent access is enforced
• Scope recipes for agent jobs
• Authentication and API keys
• Permission scopes — quarantine:request and quarantine:approve
• REST API — the agent-attribution and containment endpoints in full
• Memory provenance and quarantine — the sibling workflow that labels a memory item, not a credential