An AI Agent Got Its User Banned From Resy — Keycard, JPMorgan Chase & AAuth Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:12 Um, hi everyone. Welcome to um, AI Engineer New York. I'm super excited to be here today. Uh, my name is Ally. How I'm a member of technical staff at Keycard. Um, I'm here with some amazing panelists today. We have Ian, CEO of Keycard. We have Michael Davis, um, global chief security architect at JP Morgan Chase, and we have we have Dick Hart, the founder of AOTH and co-creator of OOTH with us on stage today.

00:40 I'm super excited to talk to all of them about intentbased authorization. Um, and to set the stage, I want to bring to light that as more companies are looking to give their agents increased levels of autonomy, they're looking to runtime authorization to help. Runtime off is the practice of authorizing an agent per tool call rather than having the agent hold broadstanding access that it will eventually misuse.

01:07 However, is this tool call or not is never a simple question. This is because many MCP tools and APIs are coarse grain. Humans struggle to write the perfect policy and the environment around the agent will change as it runs. Intent can help by providing extra context so that at runtime we can make better authorization decisions about what an agent is allowed or is not allowed to do.

01:36 So to continue I would like to talk about um really dive into why do we need intentbased off in the first place. Models have dramatically improved. They have bigger context windows. They're able to verify work because model vision capabilities have improved. In many contexts, people are proclaiming that AGI is here. If the models are so good, if AGI is really here today, then why are teams struggling to give their agents more autonomy?

02:02 Ian, let's start with you. You're helping men and financial enterprises at Keycard. What are you seeing that's getting in the way? >> Well, I think broadly speaking, enterprises, especially financial services firms, regulated industries are almost always security first. It's how they build trust in their business and maintaining the business continuity is by our first like the first priority then innovation is second third or fourth I think like broadly speaking in in any enterprise what you see is this like hodgepodge

02:29 of different little islands of different little identities of different little systems of from across all different worlds and how do you actually tie that together in a way that an agent can navigate through that ask for access and then also ensure that the agent can outperform like uh something that was by the user or the business And the unfortunate situation is most of our systems today are coarse grained right I don't know Salesforce is a good example where a very long time they had a single scope which was API on

02:56 their oath which is like in the context of an agent uh not very helpful so that's that's the broadly the first and foremost part is that most of the systems they have for security today were designed for a world where humans were making all the decisions and software is very deterministic not this new fangled magic box we've invented that basically reasons and tries over and over again to find a solution to a problem.

03:19 >> Doug, how is OOTH part of the problem? How is OOTH getting in the way and why is it not the right fit for agents? >> Well, when people started looking at how do we authorize agents to access something, the tool that was sitting there on the shelf was OOTH and people grabbed that tool and says here's a tool. This is authorization. It should be able to solve the problem.

03:37 But OOTH was not designed for this kind of world. It was designed originally for like how do I let this website talk to this website? You know in O2 we added scopes. Before that it was just do anything. Um but it required you to be pre-registered. It's expecting that there's a browser involved in a redirect. You know OOTH has evolved over the years to support some other things.

04:00 But the agentic world is completely different. We don't know ahead of time what the agent needs to do. We need to go and make that decision over time. different instances of an agent are going to need different kinds of things. And you know, as Ian talked about, the granularity of the scopes that people says, well, we already have scopes for OAS. Let's just map those over to agents is far too coarse grain for what agents are doing.

04:24 >> Davis, how are you seeing enterprises move towards higher levels of autonomy? >> Yeah, I think the key piece is uh how do you deal with that coarse grain problem? And what I've seen the kind of more successful enterprises is they kind of board agents like they onboard developers right start with you don't get full you know commit access day one right you're actually having to go through and add the levels of capability as they mature right and so the definitions that enterprise are coming up with what is the context

04:50 that makes this agent safe and it isn't just usually what the agent says right um it can you know attest to something but it's other things like the environment around it and other information that can help you understand levels of autonomy Very simple example would be where is the sandbox running is it in a sandbox right those type of things can change the level of autonomy that's allowed >> absolutely yes we mentioned that core screen access problem and to put that into perspective um to give an example um with

05:17 notion's MCP server you can say fetch this page which is like the view page um tool or get page but you can't say just get this database on this page um how is runtime authorization based on intent a better model that's for anyone. >> I'll take a shot at. So to me, um this is something that the financial services industry hopefully maybe we can learn from the background that you know banks have gone through.

05:42 Um banks moved long ago from authorizing and authenticating humans to authorizing the transaction, right? And when is that transaction occurring? At runtime, right? Um, and so I think that, you know, runtime authorization is we're going to be able to learn from the kind of the scars of the past that we've had and apply it to this new new problem. Um, I also think that uh, you know, one thing is easier to debug something at runtime when you understand the intent, right?

06:08 I think we've all remembered back in the day writing checks, right? But, um, or seen those things on TV now, I guess, is the right thing. Um, but, uh, you know, writing checks, there was a memo field there, right? That memo field was used to actually tell the intent of what this payment was. But the check itself did have limits, right? The price, the pay, the date, etc.

06:26 Right? I think a lot of those concepts are now being applied and can be applied to help with this runtime. >> Intent's sort of one of those, you know, like many words, words are hard. And so, you know, building on uh the example here of making a payment of a transaction, right? You know, that's not a scope. That's can I do this one thing in this particular context?

06:46 Well, this one payment, but I think we need a an agent. we to make any decision should it be able to do it you need all the rest of the context of why are we making this payment what are all the things that happened before you know did we just make the same payment just like you know 5 seconds ago and now this is a double payment right you know just because this is right in context doesn't by itself doesn't mean it's the right thing within the broader mission and so you know in AOTH we're working on the concept of a

07:16 mission that is what do we want the agent to accomplish big picture and then each of the decision decisions are made within the context you know the intent around what's happening big picture around doing that and you need granularity at the transaction layer for many of the things to know what exactly is happening not just I'm allowed to go and make payments yeah I think one of the most interesting things I think about like a practical example like to understand like why intents required is if you have two chat GPT

07:45 sessions or two cloud sessions in one session I say hey help me go to do some shopping in the other session I say, "Hey, help me understand if there why there's a bug in production." Those have very different like profiles in terms of like like what permissions they should have and also when they should bring you back into the loop, like when should the human be involved again?

08:01 And so at the end of the day, if we don't have intent or some capacity to like relay what is the user or the business's intent with this thing, we actually can't get to like autonomy, right? And so a lot of the talks this morning were, hey, we're going to run our business on agents, we're going to do all this stuff. It's like, well, great. But what happens the first minute like a pocket OS style instant happens where like it actually accidentally deletes a production database instead of staging because it has coarse

08:23 grained access instead of long scoped access. And so we what we want as an industry is to leverage this like magic box we've created to like automate our lives. The current state of the world is that you can do that and take all of the risk and then you can see all the instance that come from it. And so until we actually solve that underlying problem, realizing true autonomy, so being able to operationalize our business and be able to step away as humans and scale that, we have to solve intent first.

08:52 >> Absolutely. And now that we understand why we need intentbased off, let's talk about what it is practically. What are the primitives? What does it actually look like in practice? Um Dick hinted at it with the concept of the AOTH mission. Um so Dick, elaborate on the mission. What is the mission based off of? Is it based off of the user's intent? Is it the agent's intent?

09:11 Or is it a combination of the two? >> Uh well, the agent, you know, should be working on behalf of the person. And in AOTH, we define a person as either the organization or a human because it could be operating on either one of those. And so it needs to be acting in the best interest of the person that it's acting on because that is who's ultimately responsible for what the agent does, right?

09:35 The agent agent can't be responsible, right? And and so the mission is something that the person is giving the agent to do. The agent uh a good agent is going to go and negotiate with a person to go and talk more about like what what could what are the parameters around that. You know a good example is when you think of back you know in the day which seems like 3 months ago when you would want to code something up and you create a plan and then the agent would do the plan.

10:02 Now you just tell it and it figures everything out. But that whole concept of what's a plan? what are you trying to do? And you give that to the agent. So then that then is a context around your where you're making authorization decisions later on. And then that mission identifier tracks through everything. So you can go and you know audit and be able to see what were all the things that happened and what were the decisions that happened in the context of this one mission, right?

10:30 Where today you know there isn't really a good concept of agent identity or the mission, right? It's just making something and and things are making decisions without really knowing which expl which instance of the agent's doing it or what's a context of what mission is this involved in. Right. >> Tell me more about that negotiation phase because what happens if a user is talking to an instant agent and it talks to that agent and says I want you to go read the CEO's email.

10:57 That's outside of the scope of that agent. So is that intent rejected from the user? uh should be right so we know with a good separation and I don't know whether I forget whether we're talking about this later but the separation concerns of the worker right there's an agent that's doing the work and we believe there should be a separate agent that's supervising what this one does and so that you have a separation of concerns where this one can't do any of the work but it gets decide what this agent gets to do and so

11:29 if the user says oh I want you to go read the co's email, that's probably going to get caught in deterministic policies right away, right? Like that's not a vague thing, right? Reading reading somebody else's email, we've got good controls for that. Um, but telling the agent to, you know, send the CEO's forward a CEO's email to the outside world, that's a little more vague and that's the kind of thing that ideally comes back to a supervising agent says that's probably a bad idea and no, you can't do that.

12:04 >> Absolutely. So, I feel like that's another primitive two of intent based off is is policy. Um Ian at Keycard, how are you seeing that when a mission needs to change or a policy needs to update, how can Keycard help keep track of those changes as maybe the mission or policy updates need to be made? >> Yeah, I think like taking a step back, there's like actually was Davis and I were sitting in a room some time ago and uh before like AOTH and and some of these other things actually had emerged in the ecosystem, one of

12:28 the things we actually talked a lot about was consent fatigue. And I think like at the minimum like we you always have this like how secure do you make a system versus like the trade-off of like the impact of the human. And so you know a key card our broad view on this is you want to have like broad-based deterministic policy that basically says this is what must never happen effectively right or these are the things that always require a human be involved.

12:49 And then from there, what you really want to think about is, okay, cool. Well, now that I have that in place, there's a big gap between all the policy I can write as a human or write as an organization and then what I actually want the policy to be in the specifics of a specific task. And so the the ne the real challenge is how do I like layer over those two things, right?

13:10 Because humans can't write it all. And so there's a version of that that is like a user or agent to agent interaction and they have an intent between those two of like transactional intent. And then there's also like the business's intent for why they build or adopt an agent. So why did we buy cloud code? Well, because we wanted to make our developers more successful or because we wanted to do these different things.

13:28 And in the context of using cloud code or whatever, why am I working in this moment with cloud code? Well, it's actually to fix a bug in staging, right? And those are two different types of intent. And if we can understand those two different things and then convert that some way into into uh like a bounding box of what those agents can do, you can then basically calculate the intersection of that and say okay here's what you can actually do.

13:49 And then the trick for anyone building these systems is how do I ensure that I don't bring the user into the loop except when absolutely required because that's what's going to be the adoption curve problem. But that's also the adoption curve problem when it comes to like enabling agents to be autonomous in the first place. >> That makes sense. >> I like what you were saying with the intersection.

14:07 And I think that's a unique thing we don't talk about enough within identity and access management, right? Normally you get access to one thing, right? And so what I've seen successful kind of in this intentbased approach. Um, and where I get more excited is you can actually have that those different intents be from different areas of the organization, right?

14:23 And so you have the decoupling of these things that they can kind of live on their own but then come together to form that, you know, decision. And that decision doesn't have to be static, right? So if we use the example of the CEO's email, well you know if that context involves that's the administrative assistant then yeah maybe she is supposed to read the email right or maybe just the calendar right and so I think when we see and we start thinking about these intersection components um we have a totally different way

14:48 we can start expressing policy but also starting to bring in not just the one side of the equation we always talked about before which was the app doing something now we actually have the ecosystem you can bring in and so the more I I see organizations starting to realize that you maintaining that state or that context of these other elements to be able to help with that intention can completely change the way you're effective at runtime authorization.

15:11 >> And are you seeing this across enterprises today? Most people have mission tracking and policy tracking in place or is that largely missing today? >> No, it's it's it's brand new still. Um and I think you know part of the reason why I'm excited to talk about it because I think that it is changing the way to reason through this right even in the most simplistic case if you're a developer um and you are thinking in terms of things like transaction and you have these concepts of intent um it makes it easier for you to

15:34 potentially build the components that'll be composed and used through that intention um and so I think it'll give us more ways to reason through these and communicate and then ultimately be more interoperable right um and to me the last thing that I think is interesting is the diagnost diagnostics that you can run on this. Intention is something that flows through many events potentially, right?

15:55 And I think uh one of the examples I've seen before is, you know, talking about that like that that mission flows through. Um it could be longived. It could be weeks that [laughter] attention can still be there. Um so it's still very very early for most enterprises. >> Absolutely. And yes, that interoperability is key. I think that's pretty hard for enterprises because they're rubbing between different clouds, different environments, different legacy systems and that policy that mission has to hold through all of those

16:19 different hops. >> Yeah, a lot of enterprises still have to deal with the fact that the the permission says read only and it's still rewrite, [laughter] right? So like you have other problems you have to start dealing with and so um I think that it will help get that kind of taxonomy or language amongst people be easier to interoperate. Yeah, >> absolutely.

16:36 One of the reasons why I'm excited about intentbased authorization is because I think it has the ability to be a huge unlock for things like agentic commerce. Um, so let's apply intentbased o to something real. I think intent based off adds a lot of value here and for users it can help them ensure their agents buy the right item with their own personal budget.

16:56 And for merchants that means capturing the intent that gives them extra data to understand why a purchase is being made and if this agent should even be trusted to visit their site. Um Davis when we think about agents in the context of financial services and agentic commerce why is intentbased off so important. Um, I think simply it extends the concept maybe not everybody's aware but some are around you know know your customer right so I want to know my customer know who they are what they're doing but I think also

17:21 we're starting to see I want to know my agent right so I think that you have a coupling here around the agent itself um the intent of the actual user the intent of the operator the intent of the processor right etc um very before now we couldn't really bring those together right um it matters of course when it comes to things like commerce because you have additional layers on top of this around what was the intention for things like regulatory requirements etc.

17:45 Um and this is going to help I think simplify those operations which means we'll get more access to these agents you know doing good work for us. >> That makes sense. And another blocker for aentic commerce is the fact that the web wasn't made for agents. Um Ian can you tell us how agent identity can help? >> Yeah I think stepping back we've kind of always had this problem where like what do you do with the unregistered client?

18:09 So, like I I show up on eBay, I haven't logged in, I'm using Chrome, eBay doesn't know who I am. How do I do guest checkout? How do I prove I'm a person? How do I, you know, so they can, you know, say, "Yeah, you can bid on the this pair of stocks for $50." And if I think if we're all paying attention to what's going on in personal agents, Muse and Instinct and Grockbot and um you know recently this announcement OD to Sierra and Decagon and friends around this personal agent protocol is like the fundamental problem we

18:34 have is like how do you have an agent show up to a web website be able to interact with the website know that you actually can trust that agent. So like for a long time you've had captures on the web. Well why is because we want to prevent spam. We want to prevent abuse. So we added captures and then like that's something only a human could solve. So if we have a capture that stops spam.

18:50 So they can't spam the thing, right? And now we have agents and they've broken captas. Um, but this has like been a traditional problem on the web. In fact, if you think back two to three years, Verscell, which is I think we're all aware of Verscell, was blocked in Spain. Well, why was Versel blocked in Spain? Because Versell shared the same IP addresses for every single host on Versel.

19:08 And there was one, one host on Versell, one website in Verscell that they were hosting that was hosting like Premier League content. And Spain decided, hey, in order us to stop for that premier content being displayed illegally inside Spain, we're going to block all of Forcel, right? And so in the same way that like Verscell has the problem, agents have the same problem, but so much so much worse.

19:28 So how do you have unregistered traffic you've never met before show up to your front door and then decide whether or not you let it in or not? And that's like the actual first and foremost funal problem we have to solve. It's the same issue with Muse and Instinct. And what they're trying to do is like how do we actually create agreeable rails we can all operate on.

19:45 So as a downstream resource I can decide what what agents want to allow who I trust based on who users they are and then on the other side I can also know how to talk to those people. >> Makes sense. Dick how is AOP helping unlock the future of aentic commerce. Uh well a key thing is a number of people have been building sort of proprietary closed box systems right you know so you know I'm a fan of the concept of the personal agent protocol Poppy um but it doesn't really go far enough right it just it's like okay well

20:20 now we've got a bit of an agent identity we just use some of the building blocks and it's an attractive approach because you're just doing it but it doesn't solve many of the new things that you need for u an agent IC world and so a key motivator for people for having standards is that you can plug components from different places right so I'm a strong believer that we should have control over what our agents do at some point agents going to be so much doing so much work there's no way we can have human in the loop

20:50 approving everything right that's just not we've already seen that that isn't going to scale so that means we need to have a supervising agent that is our supervising agent that runs our policy and decides how we do things that should be independent of the agents doing all the work. And if we want to be able to plug and play those things, we need to be able to have a protocol to separate those.

21:10 Otherwise, you know, the decision about what the agent can and can't do, what the guard rails is decided by the agent, by the vendors of the agent around what you can and can't do. And I don't really want to go and give control to them to decide what I can do and that all my decisions are based in there. or I want to be able to pull that supervision into another component and in order to be able to plug and play pieces, we need to have a protocol that things interoperate.

21:36 >> I I just add to that. I think like right now what we're seeing is like we kind of like we all want the web to be federated, right? That does that that means like re like websites or resources on the web can decide what they're allowed to do, but the the standards upon which things operate should be federated enable us all to interoperate. And I think we're at a moment where things like, you know, we're at a moment where there's a couple large players and the question for the industry is, are we going to settle on

21:58 things that actually buy us to the large players and give them like concrete block doors? Are we going to move to do the thing we've always done, which is build federated protocols, things like OIDC, things like, you know, TLS? Those things operated, enabled like a broad web, enabled a lot of commerce to occur, enable a lot of information to flow, enabled all of us to have jobs in a way that because we could be inventive.

22:15 And so the question I actually asked the broad industry is okay this stuff's coming. Which version of the world do we want one way or the other? >> Yeah. I add though I think um it's interesting that let's say this all goes perfect and we've got you know agents buying stuff and everybody's kind of happy. What I think will end up happening is we'll start realizing that we have another piece that we have to start working on which is the human itself.

22:36 And so one of the things I think when you start having intents being involved is you get what's called psychological ownership. Meaning I actually now have a linkage between the human and the outcome of that agent. when you're just kind of, you know, disconnecting it or you you connect it up an ooth scope or something like that in a claim and let it's kind of magic and then you don't really know what's going on.

22:55 And so I think it'll with intention it'll be easier for a human to take accountability when things do go wrong. And I think when you're talking about real money being transferred or things like that, you want to have that human ultimately accountable. I think many people have probably seen the uh 1979 IBM manual. It says uh you know and so like that that photo I think is very true in that we can't have the machines be accountable right we're going to have to have the humans link to it and intention I think is that link

23:20 >> yes and then yeah another word for intent is motive like we're were talking about last night um and that ability to hold someone accountable whether it's a person or an agent I think is really important and I think intent can also help with that be able to understand why did this go wrong was it the user's um you know the user was maligned the agent was maligned.

23:40 Um, and then using that intent to be able to respond. Um, for each of you, how are you seeing intent provide that benefit and the ability to respond to potentially a maligned user or agent? >> Uh, I think it's going back to what I mentioned before about diagnosing, right? So, the if if you change the word intent to motive, then you change diagnostics to forensics, right?

23:57 And I think um anybody who's done debugging or had to do forensics of an AI agent gone rogue will know that like trying to figure out what it was trying to do versus what the intention of the user was uh is very hard right um so having some of that information being propagated and immutable through the system etc gives you some properties that allow you to more shortcircuit your investigation right um and as those things become more interoperable I think we're going to start seeing companies be able to more quickly

24:24 kind of scope and identify well was this human error was this an agent software error is this what was that error and handle that blast radius appropriately. uh we see in the financial system right you have different things when you're doing a transaction around okay I made this payment but it was you know incorrect dollar amount or whatnot you have clear guidelines on how to work with that we don't have a lot of those when things go wrong right now so I think intention will help us build those as we get go forward >>

24:52 and I think one area where a recent incident kind of highlights uh where intent um you can have like good intent but still take potentially the wrong action is the resi incident um that happened recently where an Instinct agent went out on behalf of a user and tried to book a restaurant reservation on resi.com. Um that agent was very eager. It made 200 API calls an hour and it ended up getting the user's resi account banned.

25:18 Um Dick, how can AOTH budgets help in the case where an agent like that is using way too much of a downstream resource, but it still has good intent? >> Yeah. Well, this is another example about how just software is completely different now in the agentic world, right? When it was predetermined software, you know, that was a bug if you called 200 times and you would fix it.

25:40 Um, where now, well, the agent's like, well, I'll just keep trying until I win. Um and so we saw that as we were you know experimenting working with people with AOTH and we realized yeah there's a big problem that agents will learn something and they'll just uh abuse the system from they don't think it's of abuse. They don't know any different. There's been no signal to tell them that oh I should only use this amount of stuff.

26:05 And so we added the concept of budgets where not only do you give a token to the agent that's timelmited as to how long can they do a particular action but also a budget of how much resource they can do. And so they have access until the the tokens either expired or they've exhausted the budget. And so that way when they come back and you know they've exhausted all the budget the supervision you can go and decide should I give more budget to this agent or not as opposed to traditional rate limiting which just cuts it

26:37 off and then like then what do you do right and it doesn't know well why did I get cut off or anything like that where in budget there's continual feedback to the agent about how much budget was consumed has an idea about how much budget it has and so now it can operate within a budget right like a person would do about oh this resource is scarce I'm going to be careful about how much I use this >> then how does the brains versus the hands architecture concept come into play here to allow us to okay when a maj budget

27:08 is close to being fully reached or is reached um how can the brain and hand separation of of access and the credentials being separate from the agent in the model itself help us to be able to stop an agent from using too much of a downstream resource cuz it's getting close then Maybe we don't exercise uh the ability to give it another credential for example.

27:28 >> Uh sorry I didn't quite follow the echo in here is horrible. So >> no worries that's for anyone but basically like so with the brains in the hands architecture that we're converging on in an industry. We're basically keeping the credentials and the access from an agent separate from the agent itself. So there's no broadstanding access that an agent has today.

27:46 No API keys which I know is a benefit of AOTH that AOF allows agents to run without API keys. How is that helpful in the context of the resi incident >> the when you've got the access to it? Um sorry I still don't understand. >> Yeah I can jump in. Yeah thanks. >> I got I got you dick. So like broadly speaking look I think if we look back at an incident that I just keep in the top of my mind is like pocket OS where I found like a random key on on a disc, right?

28:13 Like obviously agents are deeply goal seeking. So the core of the the core of the the question is like okay well if we give these like agents the brain which is the model and the LLM and you have these hands which is you kind of give them put them in a sandbox and inside the sandbox the tools um like the funal idea of the sandbox here that that's all that is that okay there's you can control what's inside of it so it can't actually like get API access and then if you have an egress proxy outside the sandbox that's

28:39 where you get to have your authorization boundary and so not only does it help do translation between systems right? Which is like that's where athos can exist and talk to the outside world or do termination but also means that like the agent you have like a ability to apply authorization at the egress proxy boundary and so I think at the core of it that model which is the predominant model that entropic and openi and many other labs are pursuing today is is the model that allows us to both do both have the things we

29:06 want which is how do we have these things experiment and try stuff out and do silly things which is the core value while also having a deterministic layer outside of it that can implement things like aoth and all the other components we want in our protocols. >> I think the decoupling is valuable, right? Going back to mentioned with forensics and be able to separate things, but I do think that we still have a lot to learn on it isn't just one brain, right?

29:30 And it's very easy actually to build your agent loop where you put the brain in the loop rather than outside the loop. Right? So, example of this would be, you know, people that are leveraging memory systems. um they put in some memory and some context that is now used going forward for every agent that is biasing that agent to make a decision to tell the hands in this case to go do something it shouldn't do and so one of the things that I think we don't talk about enough here is toxic combinations right um and so when

29:54 you do separate the hands and the brain and whatnot you can actually change up you know what hands are available right so the example that you know I've seen be very successful is the removal of tools dynamically based on that actual brain and what it's doing so the earlier example we gave of reading an email. Um there's nothing that says that oh if they're going to go write an email I'm going to disable all you know web search tool calls or any other external egress capability tool call ww wise until the right email

30:19 tool has been complete and that you know mission has been done then I can reenable them right and so um I think that we have to we're going to start becoming more and more uh engineering in these different kind of concepts that um they are still complicated they're still growing and still nent but I think it's a better separation of what we have today.

30:37 Yeah, and this is how these things we're talking about which you know seemed like geeky O problems actually then merge back up to like real agent engineering problems which is if you actually understand what you're doing you know one of the biggest complaints less now but one of the biggest complaints with MCP was context bloat like especially when we had smaller context windows right but intent systems can ensure that the right capabilities are given to the agent at the right time so they don't spend a bunch of time

30:59 doing things they shouldn't be doing right they actually helps them navigate towards the goal state and helps them put them on a more of a paved path so intent like not only unlocks like a bunch of security stuff. Intent also will result in us spending less tokens because the agent will spend time doing less things that aren't the right pathway or it'll come up to the point say, "Hey, I just can't do it."

31:19 And so what we know about this era is so much of it is about nudging the agent in the right direction and ensuring you can't do the wrong thing and that's how you get the outcome you want. >> Davis, how are you seeing intentbased as part of a larger strategy for production agents? I know when it comes to building, deploying, and operating agents in production, there's many different outcomes teams should be thinking about such as discovering what's running, what agents capabilities are, the ability to validate inputs

31:45 and outputs, constraining an agent like we talked about, and using the egress proxy and different networking rules. Um, how does all of this fit into play and what's working inside enterprises today to really be able to ship agents to production? Yeah, I I think we're finally it's helping move the kind of conversation from authentication to authorization and really like how do we do dynamic authorization?

32:06 How do I validate that authorization? How do I have the human in the loop at the right time? Because I agree with what Dick was saying earlier that the human in the loop is somewhat of an anti-attern in many ways, right? Um because they can get fatigue etc. But you need to have a way to bring them in when it's important. Those were not engineering discussions before, right?

32:22 Now they're actually part of the engineering conversation where engineers are being involved in the authorization process. They're not just saying, "Oh, I've got my access. I'm good to go." So that actually changes the way we're seeing threat models done. It changes the way we're seeing the full attack surface of applications in general. Um and so I think you're now looking at this authorization model as a another kind of set of tools that you can use to reduce not just um security issues, but flatout error rates of

32:48 your agent, right? Like I mean when you have less things the agent can do it makes better decisions right and so fundamentally we've seen you know real world cases where the agent loop is just better faster stronger because you've actually spent the time on knowing what is the intent they're trying to get what's the mission that they're trying to accomplish.

33:05 And then last thing is it brings the people together in terms of we now have other different people, the security team, the application team. They're now able to have a conversation that they're using the same language. And a lot of times when it came to identity, it was a completely different language, right? Um and it was just like get out of my way.

33:23 What do I have to go do to go ahead and get my, you know, token and I can go forward. Now they're seeing that you can actually pair these things and leverage that capability um to drive, you know, efficiency of your actual agents outcome. >> That makes sense. Ian, how are you applying these concepts to software factories? I know today you released a reference architecture on the secure software factory.

33:42 How are you applying the concepts of runtime authorization constraining agents and all of that to that? >> Yeah, I think like so there is a a reference architecture we just published on agentbaseline.org. Um we talked about three different levels of of factory. one being like a human-driven one, one being a workflow driven one, one being like this agentic driven one, which is like the thing we all basically want to get to, which is like it's it's driven by agents at all points in time.

34:07 The runtime authorization is a core component of a larger ecosystem. It actually enables the the factory to like be able to be pointed in a direction and do the right thing and also get access to the right piece. And it's very it looks different than previous things that you would have used like a secret manager because it's making very different decisions than previous generations head for managing deterministic software.

34:27 But it is a core component of enabling the entire thing to work like when to bring someone into the loop when what agents can pass what work off to what other agents. You know how can we have an agent that can have access to production systems and do an auto patch. Um these are fundamental questions of like how do we actually solve at scale software.

34:41 Right now we're in a position where like we've never been able to generate more software. uh but we never actually but we have a complete bottleneck in getting into production ensuring it works and that's the the next phase is like how do you actually graduate from just using LM to generate text and software to actually making it capable of deploying it into production iterating on it and getting it to a stable state quickly and then responding to instances they arise >> Davis on a podcast you did with me we talked

35:09 about how cyber security has something to learn from robotics um in robotics there's this concept when maybe a robot raises its arm arm. It thinks is it safe for me to raise my arm? Should I am I allowed to do that? But it also looks at its external environment and says, "What has changed? Is it is it still safe for me to raise my arm?" Um, when we think about runtime authorizations, what do those decisions need to take into context beyond just intent?

35:33 >> Yeah, I think um having a model like this allows us to add in more sensors into our decision. So the robotics example of you know an arm moving up or down um any of the external factors it could be are there other objects near it right um it could be temperature it could be well am I moving and I'm don't want to move my arm while my you know the the rest of the robot's moving etc so it's usually looking at all different types of things none of those are deterministic they're all probabilistic so there's a range of

35:59 options and it picks the best option based on all of those sensor data at one time most authorization decisions in organizations today are single binary decision, right? And that just doesn't work in the future, right? So, being able to pair the intent of what a user is trying to do with the ecosystem that the user is doing it in. That could be where they're doing it from, time of day, but it could be even more advanced things like, for example, should I let, you know, this administrator use Firefox to access this

36:28 server right now when this server has, you know, high-risisk vulnerabilities and their system hasn't been patched to. Right? Now all of a sudden you're bringing in a lot more context into the environment around it and again um that can be through different teams but more importantly through sensors and I think we've all kind of seen the value of observability in general.

36:45 Imagine being able to have this type of context at the span level from an Otel perspective or something right you're looking at a trace you've got a span and you actually know what the environment was outside your application at that time as well as what the user's intention was. Um that allows you to diagnose things in a completely different way. Um, and so I think if we can bring in some of those concepts, we'll get shorter time, shorter shorter to live, you know, um, authorization decisions that have much more

37:12 context than even just a user's intent. It'll be the state of the environment around it. >> That makes sense. And forward looking as we evaluate whether intentbased authorization is working in our environments, one natural place to look will be a log of the agents actions. Um, what was denied, what was allowed. Um, Ian, why is it important to have your auto log separate from the agent itself, meaning outside of its control?

37:37 >> Yeah, I think this comes back to also just like why the enforcement point has to be outside the like primary like hands and brains of of an agent, right? You can't trust this thing. And so, in the hugging phase incident, it had a couple different components of it. I mean, one obviously abused a vulnerability we didn't know about in Squid in Squid proxy, but more importantly, you didn't have any observability or monitoring about what was going on.

37:54 And so this thing was able to go in the open internet through this vulnerability and there was no like place at which recorded the different actions that this agent was taking and for them to monitor. And so independent of like whether we're applying like a you know enforcement point to network traffic that's pushing on the internet that it's outreach of the agent to tamper with or we're using you know solving vulnerabilities as they pop up.

38:14 You know this this hugging face one is a little unique. Um we still need to actually have a record of like who told this agent to do what thing for what purpose and is that still true? Um because ultimately at the end of the day what we're doing with agents is we is is a liability question. And so this is why I actually don't think we need more regulation around agents.

38:29 What we just need is our pre-existing laws around liability to be held to be dealt with which is if I employ an agent do some action who is liable if that action causes damage right it is the person who employs it which could be an organization or a person or someone that delegated some action to something that is like that's the final question we have to deal with and then of course you have to ability to answer that question which is well who did it which is where the tamper resistant autolog comes from >> perfect

38:57 and then to wrap up I wanted to ask you all a fun question. So there's a concept of the probability of doom or pdoom where the uh AI doomers are saying that AI agents are going to um release all sorts of havoc or be like the ruin to humanity whereas the AI optimists are like no this is really you know poised to help us it's not a genuine threat. Um for each of you on the panel, what is your take on this?

39:19 Is you know runtime authorization based on intent and the other things we talk about like constraining agents, validating inputs, outputs, a holistic strategy for production agents. Is that enough to save us? Is Poom real or is it not worth the hype? >> You get to start there. >> Oh, I did. >> You got that spicy look on your face. [laughter] Uh uh well part of your question is are agents going to take over?

39:45 And uh I I think agents being fully autonomous and not really tied to a particular organization is still science fiction, you know, so who knows, right? Like that's a that's one direction. Another one is in a responsible organization put in the right controls, agents aren't, you know, we're getting in evolving enough of the tools to make sure that bad things don't happen in a responsible organizations to put in the right controls.

40:09 And so that leaves two scenarios for where there's going to be a potential problem. One of those is in an organization that isn't got its act together, an insider threat could go and unleash an agent to cause havoc, right? And so they've got some special access that other people have. The other one, the one that I'm more concerned about is, you know, it's been shown, you know, the hugging faces.

40:31 And if you watch the the talk that they gave at Black Hat, right, that was really a call to arms around, you know, here's a situation where we didn't want a bad thing to happen and a bad thing did happen. What about people that want bad things to happen and have these tools and that I think is a threat that's the one that's potentially going to have I mean it's going to happen and there's going to be some catastrophes.

40:58 Hopefully, we're prepared enough that those aren't horribly disastrous, but it's going to be, you know, some there's going to be some things that are like massive natural disaster like scale issues caused by malicious actors either kind of intentionally or kind of unintentionally, but it's where people aren't being responsible in their use of these super powerful tools.

41:24 >> Yeah, I can't give necessarily a specific probability, right? But what I uh can say is I think I've always been you know kind of uh surprised and excited when you know ingenuity of engineers gets involved in problem solving and I think where we're at the stage now like some of the new capabilities within agents etc. We have real engineers, folks that are here actually just iterating on the problem, right?

41:44 We're starting to see just tremendous improvement in the, you know, in my mind, some of the capabilities that'll be available to change what our future can be. And so to me, I have no problem kind of believing the engineers are going to figure out a solution here. >> I mean, maybe I have the hottest take. I mean, like I can't say it's equal to zero, but I would say it's approaching asmtoically zero.

42:02 Uh, is the probability the world is going to end. Uh, I think like the incentive structure for most people is to continue. Um and also at the end of the day like we still have liability frameworks and you know I think generally humans are good people so we don't set out to destroy the world specifically. Um I also think like broadly speaking like these agents at the end of I have this sort of hot take I say which is like they can just be unplugged but I think it's just true.

42:24 It's like at the end of the day like they you can just they're computers we can unplug them. Um and at so broadly speaking I I don't believe in the debate. I I don't think it's real. I think at the at the upside of it, I I kind of believe more more to what Davis's position is is we're iterating very quickly. We're figuring out where these things can work, where they don't.

42:41 And when they don't work, they create damage. And that's what ultimately like sort of um the antibbody of society is that says, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't do this." Like this is probably a bad thing. >> So, I'm the doomer on the on the panel. >> Yeah. [laughter] It's unfortunate for, you know, people like the P, you know, the founder of Pocket OS who like lost a bunch of data like but it's great for the rest of us because we all learn together and uh at the end of the day like that results in people not doing things that

43:04 don't make a lot of sense and I think that will continue to be true. >> Makes sense. Thank you each for your expertise and your time here on this panel today and thank you to the audience for listening and we'll catch you next time. Thank you. Thanks, Marshall. [applause]