Isabelle Williams of WorkOS demonstrates how to make an application ready for agent users, using a travel app called Waypoint. She covers the auth.md protocol for anonymous agent access and claim flows, ID-JAG identity assertions that let an agent's provider vouch for a user without a signup form, and scoped, revocable agent tokens that keep agent permissions auditable and bounded.
A panel of experts discusses the challenges of granting autonomy to AI agents due to coarse-grained authorization systems. They advocate for intent-based runtime authorization, leveraging concepts like "missions" and "budgets" from AOTH, brain-hands architecture, and dynamic policy management. The discussion covers agentic commerce, accountability through tamper-resistant audit logs, and whether P(doom) is a real threat, emphasizing engineering ingenuity and societal learning from failures.
Jan Čurn, founder and CEO of Apify, argues that the backlash against MCP targets the wrong layer. Context bloat and token burn come from naive agent harnesses, not the protocol. He reviews the industry's three main fixes (sub-agents, progressive tool discovery and Code Mode), explains why agents work well with CLIs, proposes MCP for remote access and CLIs for local use, and demos mcpc, Apify's open-source universal MCP CLI client, alongside early Connector Evals results.
Grant Miller outlines five evolving patterns for integrating AI agents with tools, starting from simple direct API connections to complex, secure token-based architectures. The discussion highlights the progression of these methods, emphasizing how authentication, user delegation, abstraction layers like MCP, and secure credential management using vaults improve security, observability, and scalability in agentic systems.
Grant Miller contrasts the static, single-application context of traditional OAuth with the dynamic, multi-system nature of agentic AI. He explains that agentic flows, involving orchestration, multiple agents, and LLMs, require a more sophisticated approach than simple prompt engineering. The video introduces 'context engineering' as the key strategy, which involves managing the entire system state, user context, and task history to optimize AI interactions and deliver accurate, context-aware responses.
This session from Okta and Auth0 introduces a comprehensive framework for securing AI agents, covering identity establishment, delegated API access via Token Vault, user consent for risky operations using Asynchronous Authorization (CIBA), and integration with MCP servers.