NOTE: I'M WORKING ON THIS AS A PR - JUST PUTTING HERE FOR REFERENCE

Summary

Currently, group tool policies apply to ALL senders in a group. There's no way to give different users different tool access levels within the same group.

Current Behavior

"groups": {
  "*": {
    "requireMention": true,
    "tools": {
      "allow": ["read", "web_search", "web_fetch"]
    }
  }
}

This applies the same tool policy to everyone in the group.

Proposed Behavior

Add per-sender tool policy overrides within groups:

"groups": {
  "*": {
    "requireMention": true,
    "tools": {
      "allow": ["read", "web_search", "web_fetch"]
    },
    "toolsBySender": {
      "+64273931111": {
        "allow": ["read", "write", "exec", "web_search", "web_fetch"]
      },
      "+6421234567": {
        "allow": ["read"]
      }
    }
  }
}

Use Case

• Owner wants full tool access in groups they participate in
• Trusted team members get expanded access (e.g., exec, write)
• Regular group members get read-only access
• Untrusted members get chat-only (no tools)

Implementation Notes

• toolsBySender should override the group-level tools policy for matching senders
• Should work with E.164 phone numbers (WhatsApp) and platform-specific identifiers (Slack user IDs, Telegram usernames, etc.)
• Could potentially reuse the groupAllowFrom pattern for consistency

Related

• tools.elevated.allowFrom already does per-sender gating for elevated exec
• This would extend similar per-sender control to all tools