Identity

I’m giving a talk at Confidential Computing Summit 2026 in San Francisco on Tuesday. The title is “Trust Is the Next Bottleneck.” This essay is the argument behind the slides. The short version: we are building an economy of autonomous AI agents on a trust foundation designed for humans clicking buttons. That foundation is cracking. The fix isn’t better software — it’s hardware. The gap between authorization and execution OAuth tokens, API keys, and IAM roles answer one question: who authorized this action? ...

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. ...