AI Agents Have an Identity Crisis and OAuth Alone Will Not Fix It

Why multi-agent systems need verifiable delegation, not just valid tokens A human prompts an agent. That agent delegates to another agent. A sub-agent calls a tool, which calls an API, which touches real data and real systems. Now the key question: Who is acting at each step, and on whose authority? Most teams answer this with one of two lines: “We use OAuth through MCP.” “Our platform handles access controls.” Both can be true. Neither is enough for multi-step agent workflows. ...

February 25, 2026 · 3 min · Pawan Khandavilli

MCP is a Capability System (Treat It Like One)

MCP is becoming the USB‑C of agent tooling—a universal interface that lets LLMs query data, call APIs, and take real‑world actions. Adoption is accelerating fast. But every convenience layer in security carries the same risk: teams connect it before they’ve defined the capability model. MCP is no exception. It creates a new trust boundary, and most deployments aren’t treating it like one. If you’re deploying MCP (or any agent tool protocol), the right mental model isn’t “prompt injection is an LLM bug we can filter.” The right mental model is: MCP is a capability system. Once you see it that way, the security work becomes familiar—permissions, isolation, auditing, and blast‑radius control. ...

January 27, 2026 · 3 min · Pawan Khandavilli

Google's AP2 Protocol: Building Trust in Autonomous Transactions

It’s been a while since I felt giddy reading a specification. The release of Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) brought back memories of my payments days—waiting eagerly for Visa and Mastercard to publish updates on network tokenization, or when Android introduced Host Card Emulation. Here’s what stood out. What Is AP2? The Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is Google’s ambitious attempt to create a cryptographic foundation for AI agent–initiated commerce. Released on September 16, 2025 with backing from 60+ organizations, it tackles the central trust problem: ...

January 23, 2026 · 3 min · Pawan Khandavilli

WhatsApp’s Private Processing: Confidential Computing at Internet Scale

The Confidential Computing Consortium defines confidential computing as “the protection of data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based, attested Trusted Execution Environment.” It’s a powerful idea. Instead of trusting operators or cloud providers, you trust hardware itself to keep your data protected even while it’s being processed. When WhatsApp recently announced new AI features like summarizing messages or helping draft replies, most people saw just another set of productivity tools. What went unnoticed is that behind these features sits one of the most ambitious privacy technologies ever deployed: confidential computing at internet scale. ...

January 23, 2026 · 5 min · Pawan Khandavilli