403 — Forbidden — guardrail, and often intentional

The request is authenticated and paid for, but a guardrail forbids it. On Forge, guardrail writes are human-approved by design, so an agent hitting 403 on a write is frequently correct behaviour rather than a bug.

Start free HTTP / REST → canonical

Diagnosis

When you hit this

An agent attempting a guardrail write, which is restricted to humans deliberately.
An operation outside the key's granted scope.

Resolution

How to fix it

Do not automate around it
If an agent needs a guardrail changed, route it to a human approval step.
Check the key's scope
A scoped key may be read-only by design.

Normalization

What Forge does about it

This is a design decision, not an oversight. Safety-relevant writes require a human, so automating around a 403 defeats the control it represents. Read paths are unaffected.