IBM says new HashiCorp Vault capabilities, expanded through AuthMind, are intended to identify agents, trace who authorised them, constrain access and watch credentials as agents use tools and data.

IBM is extending HashiCorp Vault beyond the moment a credential is issued and into the period when an AI agent actually uses it. The company says new capabilities, expanded through its acquisition of AuthMind, are designed to establish an agent identity, link it to an owner or authorising entity and observe access to applications, tools and data.

That moves the control discussion in the right direction. A credential proves that something can authenticate; it does not prove that the current task is legitimate, that the permission is still appropriate or that the agent is behaving within mandate. Security teams need identity, short-lived access, workload context, action evidence and a clear intervention path to operate together.

IBM has not published independent production evidence showing how the controls perform across diverse agent frameworks or how false positives are handled. Buyers should therefore treat the announcement as architecture to test rather than proof of outcome.

Execution Level Governance- What audit-ready agent governance actually looks like
David Girvin, founder and CEO of Assury argues that model-in-the-loop review, AI governing AI, is fundamentally unreliable for regulated environments: even the best-performing models miss a meaningful share of violations, the reviewing model is typically provided by the same vendor being reviewed, and prompt injection or context poisoning can compromise both the acting agent and its supposed overseer simultaneously. He makes the case for deterministic, architecturally enforced controls instead, walking through Assury's approach of autonomy zones, session risk accumulation, and credential starvation, which lets a compromised agent be cut off from its tools instantly rather than relying on time-boxed access. The conversation touches on why David is sceptical of just-in-time credentialing as a solution for agent security more broadly, since agent sessions don't run on predictable human timescales, along with the current gap between how identity and security vendors are pitching agent protection and what he sees happening at the execution layer in practice. He also discusses the compliance and audit implications of probabilistic decision-making, arguing that regulated industries will increasingly need tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trails that can withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators who are only beginning to understand agentic risk, and reflects on a named frontier lab's own published framework as an example of the gap between research and practitioner reality. Elsewhere, David reflects candidly on building a bootstrapped security company in an increasingly crowded market, why he turned down aggressive VC funding to stay in control of the product, and what a credible third-party assessment of his own gateway would need to look like given that Assury sits directly in the execution path for every customer's agents.
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