fix(mcp): preserve external policy authority

[apurvvkumaria]

Summary

MCP bridge add, remove, restart, rebuild, and destroy operations now retain exact policy-authority receipts. Authority drift stops further policy-sensitive mutation and suppresses success publication.

Related Issue

Part of #9833

Changes

• Qualify exact MCP policy requirements for managed and externally managed policy.
• Revalidate authority and bridge state before provider, adapter, policy, registry, and sandbox mutations.
• Preserve durable recovery markers and complete exact compensation after a refusal.
• Cover add, remove, restart, rebuild, destroy, retry, drift, and post-delete finalization.

Type of Change

• Code change (feature, bug fix, or refactor)
• Code change with doc updates
• Doc only (prose changes, no code sample modifications)
• Doc only (includes code sample changes)

Quality Gates

• Tests added or updated for changed behavior
• Existing tests cover changed behavior — justification:
• Tests not applicable — justification:
• Sensitive paths changed (security, policy, credentials, preflight, onboarding, inference, runner, sandbox, or messaging)
• Sensitive-path review completed or maintainer-approved waiver recorded — reviewer/approval link/justification:
• Non-success, skipped, or missing CI check accepted by maintainer — check name, approval link, and follow-up issue:

Verification

• PR description includes a Signed-off-by: line and every commit appears as Verified in GitHub
• Normal pre-commit, commit-msg, and pre-push hooks passed, or npm run validate:pr passed after refreshing origin/main when hooks were skipped or unavailable
• Targeted behavior tests pass for the current change set, or tests are marked not applicable above — 545 focused CLI tests and 136 changed integration tests passed
• Applicable broad gate passed — npm test for broad runtime/test-harness changes; npm run check for repo-wide validation/coverage changes — command/result:
• Quality Gates section completed with required justifications or waivers
• No secrets, API keys, or credentials committed
• npm run docs builds without warnings (doc changes only)
• Doc pages follow the style guide (doc changes only)
• New doc pages include SPDX header and frontmatter (new pages only)

Signed-off-by: Apurv Kumaria akumaria@nvidia.com

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[github-code-quality]

Code Coverage Overview

Languages: TypeScript

TypeScript / code-coverage/plugin

The overall line coverage in commit 230dfb2 in the codex/9833-mcp-autho... branch remains at 96%, unchanged from commit 009ab57 in the codex/9833-channel-a... branch.

Show a line coverage summary of the most impacted files.

File	codex/9833-channel-a... 009ab57	codex/9833-mcp-autho... 230dfb2	+/-
nemoclaw/src/sh...cy-boundary.cts	100%	98%	-2%
nemoclaw/src/bl...print/runner.ts	97%	96%	-1%
nemoclaw/src/bl...est-fixtures.ts	100%	100%	0%

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_{Updated August 24, 2026 19:47 UTC}

[apurvvkumaria]

The MCP discovery failures came from remove using an empty network-policy map as an authority probe. The policy parser correctly rejects that map before inspection.

Verified commit 7d8081e uses a valid capability-free per-server entry for managed removal. Recorded external authority requires the exact rendered MCP policy immediately; legacy external authority retries only after preflight persists external authority, and still verifies the exact policy before mutation.

Verification:

• focused policy and remove tests: 31 passed
• MCP lifecycle integration tests: 112 passed
• CLI typecheck passed
• growth guardrails passed
• repository, targeted format, and diff checks passed
• normal commit and push hooks passed
• GitHub reports the signed commit as Verified

CI is rerunning with the corrected authority qualification.