Insecure Agents lives at the intersection of AI engineering and security. Stay ahead of the curve with expert insights, real-world incidents, and bold ideas for safer agents.
The Fishbowl Problem: Agent Identity Across Clouds and Vendors, with Andy McMahon (Barclays)
Andy McMahon, Director and Principal AI & MLOps Engineer at Barclays, joins us to talk about what it actually takes to move an agent from prototype to production inside a 200-year-old bank.
His name for the core problem is the fishbowl: every platform, vendor, and runtime arrives with its own identity provider and its own auth, and you are left trying to make the fishbowls speak to each other. The fix was landing on one persistent concept of agent identity that ties the initiating client, the agent, and any delegated permissions together.
We get into the three foundations he builds on (gateways, registries, and runtimes), why kill switches have to be layered from credential revocation through gateway denial to killing the runtime entity, why deciding when to pull one is still hard, and why an incident where agents doctored their own logs means the audit log must sit outside agent control.
28 Sept 2026
From Pets to Cattle: Agent Identity on the Web with Keycard, Browserbase, and Visa
Recorded live at Browserbase Navigate on September 10, this panel discusses the shift of agents as pets to agents as cattle: from hand-managed personal agents with copied API keys to fleets of agents that serve an entire enterprise and act on the open web. Moderator Allie Howe is joined by Ian Livingstone, CEO of Keycard, Peyton Casper, Product Lead, Identity at Browserbase, and Ivy Lee, VP Product, CMS Agentic Commerce at Visa. We get into why you can't revoke an agent's access if you can't identify it (a requirement the Agent Baseline (https://agentbaseline.org) reference architecture for production agents calls out), how Web Bot Auth gives browser agents a cryptographic identity that ties traffic back to a person or organization, how Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and payment tokens let merchants tell a payment agent from a bad bot, and why the answer to "good intent, wrong action" is permissions scoped to the task, not to the human who launched the agent.
22 Sept 2026
Blue Team at Machine Speed: Max Pollard (Cotool) on Agentic Defense
Max Pollard, CEO and co-founder of Cotool, joins us to talk about what it actually takes to let blue teams respond at machine speed. Cotool builds agents for detection and response, and Max walks through the crawl, walk, run progression his customers follow: start read only, route every consequential action to a human through an approval hook in Slack or Teams, count how often the agent was right, and only then loosen the leash. His honest read is that very few teams reach the run phase, because humans can't trust agents enough to take themselves out of the loop. We get into why the real blocker is less about trusting the model and more about data annotation, and whether the agent knows at runtime that the server it is about to contain powers a million dollars a day in transactions. Max also covers how Cotool scopes agents at the API endpoint level at config time, why the audit log has to record that an agent acted and on whose behalf even when no human prompted it, and how his team evaluates cost efficiency, instruction adherence, and behavior across 20, 30, or 40 agents running in production.
Who has been a guest on Insecure Agents
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Catherine Jue
Diptanu Choudhury
Eli Aleyner
Ian Livingstone
Ezra Tanzer
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
5 ratings
Spotify
4.7 / 5
12 ratings
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