Introduction
AuthSec is an authentication and authorization platform for AI agents and MCP servers.
We're building AuthSec because most identity products were designed around a pretty specific assumption: there's a human sitting in front of a browser, clicking through redirects, cookies, and login pages. That model works well for web apps. It breaks down fast once you start shipping agents.
Agents don't live in the browser. They run in the background, on servers, in containers, inside CLIs, and behind voice or chat interfaces. They call tools. They chain actions. They run unattended. And they still need the same fundamentals: strong authentication, least-privilege authorization, clean rotation and revocation, and real audit trails.
Here are a few places where traditional IAM starts to feel like the wrong primitive:
Agents run outside the browser
A lot of real agent deployments look like this: background workers, cron jobs, MCP tool-runners, server-side orchestrators, or RPA-style automations. There's no reliable browser context to lean on. But the system still needs to know who the agent is, what it's allowed to do, and how that permission can be revoked without shipping a mess of long-lived tokens around your infrastructure.
The UI isn't a web page anymore
For many agent experiences, the interface is voice, chat, a native app, or an embedded widget inside something else. Browser-centric SSO assumes redirects and interactive sessions. That's awkward at best and brittle at worst when the user is speaking into a microphone or approving an action from a device prompt.
Delegation is the real security problem
The key question isn't 'can the user log in?' It's 'can the user safely let an agent act on their behalf?'
That means delegation with guardrails: scoped permissions, short TTLs, explicit constraints, and clear auditability. Headless-friendly flows such as device and backchannel patterns, along with out-of-band approvals, tend to be the cleanest way to express delegation without inventing unsafe workarounds.
Enterprise constraints make this non-negotiable
In enterprise environments, agents often need to run in controlled networks such as VPC, on-prem, or edge deployments. Teams don't want identity to depend on embedded browsers or UI automation that breaks when a page changes. Headless flows are more reliable operationally, and they're easier to lock down.
