Cannot remove company-wide Rovo Agents from the "Assignee" dropdown (Permission Scheme bypassed)

[mcantin]

Hello everyone,

I am facing an issue in a specific Jira project where the "Assignee" dropdown is cluttered with every single Rovo Agent created in our company. I want to limit this list exclusively to the actual team members of the project.

Interestingly, we do not see these agents in the assignee list of other projects. Going into each agent to manually restrict them is not a maintainable solution for us, especially as new agents are created.

Here is the troubleshooting I have already done to try and block them, all of which failed:

• Project Type: It is a Company-managed project (not Team-managed).

• Permission Scheme: I went into the Permission Scheme and completely cleared the "Assignable User" permission. Even with literally zero permissions granted to be assignable, the Rovo agents still populate the dropdown.

• Browse Projects: The "Browse Projects" permission is strictly limited to the necessary project roles. There is no global group like jira-software-users or Any logged in user granting broad access.

• Project Roles / People: There are no system administrators, global add-on roles (like atlassian-addons-project-access), or overly broad groups in the project's People tab.

• Project Features: I checked the project's "Features" settings, and there is no toggle to disable Rovo or Agents specifically for this project.

It seems like Jira is injecting these AI agents at the system level, completely bypassing the standard Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Permission Schemes of the project.

My questions:

1. Why does the system bypass the "Assignable User" permission explicitly for Rovo Agents?

2. Is there a specific configuration (perhaps at the tenant/admin level) to disable Rovo agent injection for a specific project so they stop polluting our Assignee dropdown?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Accepted solution]

Hello and Welcome to Atlassian Community @mcantin 

Rovo agents in the Assignee picker are actually controlled by a quite completely different mechanism.

Their visibility is managed globally via the agent's Work items surface (Studio → Agents → Surfaces → Work items), which completely bypasses standard Jira project permissions like Assignable User.

While this doesn't give them unrestricted access because they always act on behalf of the interacting user, it does mean you can't currently restrict them on a per-project basis. Whoopsie 😅

The only current workaround is to disable the Work items surface individually for each agent you want to hide; Atlassian is tracking this limitation for bulk and project-level controls under ROVO-702.

Interestingly, because enabled agents are supposed to appear site-wide, it's unusual that you only see them in this single project.

Can you confirm if your comparison projects are on the exact same Jira site? If they are, this unexpected filtering might be a beta glitch worth flagging to Atlassian!!.

Cheers,

Arek🤠