Access Levels

Every MCP server in a workspace has an access level — a ceiling that controls which tools AI agents and team members can call. It applies to everyone equally: owners, admins, members, and any token issued against the workspace.

The three levels

Full — All tools available

No tools are blocked. Every tool the server exposes is available to callers.

Use when:

• Your own personal workspace
• Developer workspaces where you fully trust the agent
• Internal bots where you need the complete tool surface

Example: A coding assistant that needs to create branches, push files, create PRs, and delete stale branches.

Standard — No destructive tools

Write tools are allowed, but tools flagged as destructive (delete, force-push, drop table, fork, etc.) are blocked. Agents can create and update, but they cannot remove.

Use when:

• Default choice for team workspaces
• Agents shared with colleagues
• Any workspace where accidental deletions would be painful

Example: A project manager bot that creates issues, writes comments, and updates PRs — but cannot delete repositories or branches.

Read-only — Read / list / search only

Only tools marked as read-only are available. No writes of any kind, destructive or not.

Use when:

• Public workspace tokens shared with external users
• Customer-facing agents (support, Q&A)
• Research or audit bots that should never modify data
• Demos and sandboxes

Example: A knowledge assistant that can search code, list repos, and read files — but cannot create a single issue.

How levels interact with team member roles

The access level is a server-wide ceiling. Member roles add another layer on top.

The key point: access level wins over role. If the server is set to Read-only, even an Admin cannot call a write tool. The level is the hard cap; roles only add restrictions on top of it.

How levels interact with tokens

When you issue a workspace token, it inherits the server’s access level. You can further restrict a token with its own allowed_tools list — but you cannot grant more than the server level allows.

Server access level  ← hard ceiling
  └── Token allowed_tools  ← further restriction (optional)
        └── Workspace policies  ← global governance rules

Changing the access level

Open your workspace → Settings → expand any MCP server → click the Full / Standard / Read-only badge. The change takes effect immediately for all future calls.

The Tool Permissions panel below the badge lets you fine-tune individual tools within the selected level — disable specific tools you don’t need, or re-enable ones that were blocked by the level preset.

Quick reference