Descope has launched Envoy, a set of capabilities that gives personal AI agents a delegated sign-in path alongside a consumer app’s existing authentication, so that companies can accept agents with their own identities and permissions rather than treating them as the customer. GoFundMe, GoodRx, You.com and Composio are among its launch and design partners.
Descope says consumer businesses now face two poor options when an agent such as Meta’s Muse arrives at their site. They can block it, as Amazon did with Muse in September and JPMorgan Chase did with outside agents in October. Or they can let the agent sign in with the customer’s password and one-time code, in which case the session looks like an ordinary human login and any dispute points back to the person. Other vendors have approached the problem from the detection side, including Socure’s Agent Intelligence, which spots agents in browser sessions and scores whether to trust them.
Envoy is built around the Personal Agent Protocol, known as Poppy, a draft that Meta and Sierra published in October. Under the draft, a business publishes the endpoints agents should use, verifies which agent is calling and issues a session cryptographically bound to that agent. Descope handles that implementation for developers, including agent identification through client metadata documents with no pre-registration and session tokens bound to the agent’s key through Demonstrating Proof of Possession. A different proposal, Proof’s x401 protocol, has a website ask an agent to prove which verified person it represents.
Businesses set what an agent may do on a customer’s account using Rich Authorization Requests, an OAuth extension. A shopping agent, for example, could browse and place orders without touching payment methods or account settings. Sensitive actions can go to the customer for approval on a separate channel through Client-Initiated Backchannel Authentication, such as a fare an agent found overnight being approved from a phone the next morning. The customer and agent stay distinct in every token and log entry, so a company can revoke an agent’s access without signing the customer out.
“Every donation on GoFundMe is an act of trust, so when an agent acts for someone, we need to know exactly who is giving and who is acting for them,” said Arnie Katz, GoFundMe’s chief product and technology officer. Descope chief executive Slavik Markovich said consumer apps can block agents or let them sign in as humans, “but neither approach works in the long term.”
Alongside Envoy, Descope published a Poppy software development kit for agent builders. It says Envoy builds on its Agentic Identity Hub, which handles authentication and access control for more than 1,000 Model Context Protocol servers.
Sources: Descope (GlobeNewswire), SiliconANGLE
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
