Kolter: Agent identity will evolve around user personas before fine-grained permissions
Zico Kolter · AI Security After Codex and Claude Code — Zico Kolter & Matt Fredrikson, Gray Swan · Jun 22, 2026 · at 54:19
Zico Kolter, co-founder of Gray Swan, predicts how authentication and authorization architecture for autonomous AI agents will develop.
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“I think in terms of how this will evolve, actually, I don't think it'll be per app, but I think what will happen first is people have different personas that they have, right? So you don't want your work life and your home email to be mixed up. Yeah. Right. A lot of bad things can happen if that does. We are very good as humans at separating out lives, right? We have different lives. We have my work life. We have my home life. I have, you know, I have different, different work lives, right? We're very good at that. Agents are not very good at that right now. They are exceedingly bad at this. You know, the people making them have no work like that. Why would you expect the agents to have any, right? I think that's the way it's going to first develop, is there's going to be easy ways of switching between, here's a set of my accounts and apps I allow, and this one agent, here's a set of accounts and apps I allow another one, and this will evolve to be more fine-grained over time as people sort of specialize that. If I were to make a prediction about how this would evolve, I think that's the most natural thing.”
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