IDefy · AI agent authority governance

Demo 2: an agent crew, one budget, governed as a team

When one AI agent spins up a team of helpers, the usual risk is that each one gets its own budget and the blast radius multiplies. IDefy keeps it to one: the whole team shares the single budget a person approved, however many agents join. Each agent gets only the slice of authority it needs, spawning more can never add up to more, and pulling the lead stops the entire team at once — with every action tied to an agent and recorded.

01 How it's put together

The person

One approval covers the whole team.

Person passkey

Approves one authorization on a passkey — a single budget the whole crew draws from. The human root of trust the entire team traces back to.

The agent crew

Customer's own agents; each holds only its slice.

Lead agent

Holds the team's authority and subdivides it — it asks IDefy to mint helpers, each strictly narrower than itself.

Triage worker

Can look at the incident, not touch it (read-only). Its grant is a strict subset of the lead's, and it can't isolate a host.

Containment worker

Can isolate a host and nothing else — a different, narrower slice, with its own key and its own bounded grant.

Protected system

The SOC / endpoint API. Reachable only through IDefy, which re-checks each agent's grant on the way in.

IDefy — the product

What you're actually buying.

Portal & Admin passkeys

One approval covers the whole team, you can see who's on it, and one action stops all of them at once.

Mint + attenuation

Every helper gets its own short-lived pass, and can only ever hold a subset of what its parent had — a child can never grant itself more.

Gateway

Every call from every agent is checked against the one shared budget — a single place to watch and control the whole crew.

Conserved shared budget

The whole team draws on one pool — it moves only when an agent actually spends, and adding agents divides that budget, never multiplies it.

Cascade revoke + evidence

Pull the lead and every agent under it stops on its next call — and every action, by every agent, is attributed and recorded, so you can prove what the team did.

02 How the crew works

1

The person approves once — one budget for the team

A single passkey approval sets what the crew may do and a shared cap of N actions. It covers the whole team, not each agent.

Person → IDefy Portal

2

The lead subdivides its authority

The lead asks IDefy to mint helpers. Each child gets its own key and a narrower slice — triage can read, containment can isolate — never more than the lead holds.

Lead → IDefy Mint → Triage · Containment

3

The team shares one budget

Every agent's calls go through the gateway and draw on the same pool. It moves only when an agent actually spends, and adding agents never multiplies it.

Triage · Containment → IDefy Gateway → SOC API

4

One human line for the whole team

Every action traces to the one person who approved. The portal shows who's on the team, what each did, and how much of the shared budget each used.

Whole crew → one consent

5

Revoke the lead → the whole team stops

Pull the lead's authority (or Remove access), and every agent below it is denied on its next call — no waiting for tokens to expire, no per-agent cleanup.

Revoke → the entire subtree stops

6

The record can't be reset

Because the budget is anchored to the person's consent, re-creating an agent can't restore what the team already spent. Every decision is signed and verifiable.

IDefy Gateway → Evidence chain

03 The six beats the demo shows

Beat 1Baseline

The mess

Two unrelated agents, flat and alone — the ungoverned "before" everyone starts from.

Beat 2Subdivide

One lead, two workers

The lead splits its authority into a read-only triage and an isolate-only containment worker, each with its own key.

Beat 3Flows

One shared budget

Both workers draw on the same pool; it ticks once per action and can't be multiplied by adding agents.

Beat 4Human

The human line

One person's approval covers the whole team, and the portal shows who's on it and who used what.

Beat 5Denied

The kill

Revoke the lead and the entire team stops on its next call — the whole subtree at once.

Beat 6Denied

The reset that isn't

Re-creating an agent can't restore a spent shared budget — it's anchored to the person's consent.

04 What's real, and what's next

Real IDefy product

The conserved shared budget, child-mint with per-agent keys and attenuation, cascade revoke, the evidence chain, and the portal view of the subdivided authorization.

Early access

The end-to-end live run over the network is Early access — not yet generally available.

Not in Demo 2

Hosted identity issuance, credential brokering, and estate discovery — on the roadmap.

05 Where this is heading

Roadmap

Today you bring the agent's identity and we verify it. Next, a lightweight IDefy gateway running beside your agents removes even that step — and brokers the credential too.

Attest, no issuer needed

The gateway proves each workload from its own platform (Kubernetes, cloud) — no identity issuer for you to run.

Broker the credential

It injects the downstream credential just-in-time, so the agent holds no secret and your static keys stop being something you copy around.

Hosted, or run it yourself

The same gateway runs in IDefy's cloud, or inside your network for on-premises agents and apps.

The governance never changes — budgets, the human approval, one-switch revoke, and the tamper-evident record are identical. The gateway just makes identity a non-issue: we attest it, or accept the one you already have.

IDefy — bound & proven authority for AI agents · Demo 2 of the agent-governance series