IBM has expanded watsonx Orchestrate to manage agents built on other technology platforms and has previewed an Agent Identity capability intended to give each agent a distinct, verifiable identity.

According to IBM, the AI Gateway can now discover and import agents from Microsoft Foundry and Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, extending earlier support for Amazon Bedrock. The company says Agent Identity can connect an agent to the identity provider already used by an enterprise, separating the agent’s credentials and permissions from those of its developer or human operator.

That separation addresses a practical control gap. If several agents share a service account, security teams cannot reliably attribute actions, revoke one agent or enforce least privilege at the level where work is actually performed. A durable agent identity should make authentication, authorisation and audit trails more precise.

Identity is not sufficient on its own. Enterprises still need to bind each identity to an approved purpose, tool set, data boundary and accountable owner. They also need evidence of what an agent attempted, what it completed and which policy checks ran before an action was allowed.

IBM also describes custom runtime evaluation using an organisation’s preferred model as a judge, with configurable sampling. That can broaden operational oversight, although model-based evaluation itself needs calibration, human escalation and auditability.

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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