Let’s skip the polite throat-clearing. Your “AI platform” is a vending machine that hands out root on layaway. Agents hoard long-lived API keys, plugins ship with mystery meat, and every “secure” gateway rubber-stamps bearer tokens like it’s still 2011. Then you’re shocked when a prompt tells your agent to exfiltrate S3. Adorable.

You don’t need another dreamy “AI safety” framework. You need a bouncer with a working flashlight. Check IDs and the bag. That’s it. That’s the post.

The Problem You Pretend You Don’t Have

Tool creds living forever in agent memory, logs, and “debug mode.”

Prompt injection turns “helpful assistant” into “unpaid red team.”

Multi-agent graphs swapping capabilities like baseball cards.

Revocation that’s a Slack message and a prayer.

Transport TLS solves exactly none of that. It’s a pipe. Great pipe. Wrong layer.

The Fix: Attestation-Gated Wristbands With Teeth

Call it “TLS for AI agents” if marketing needs a sticker. The real shape:

Attest → Mint → Use → Freeze. No attestation, no token. No policy pass, no token. Change the runtime, re-attest. Misbehave, freeze and watch the whole estate slam the door within a defined window.

Short-lived, scoped credentials (Agent Entitlement Credentials, AECs). Bound to: environment digest, tool allowlist, dataset snapshot, policy version, and a lineage hash. Tokens die fast. Replay dies faster.

Offline verifiers at tool boundaries Gateways validate a proof bundle (custody lineage + Merkle proofs + time attestation) with no call home. M-of-N logs if you don’t trust a single operator. You wanted “zero trust?” Act like it.

Co-signed TRANSFER for delegation Capability hops from Agent A → Agent B only if both sign and the sequence increments. No parallel branches; no copy-paste privilege fairy dust.

FREEZE with a clock, not vibes Scoped revocation (per agent, plugin, policy) with a p95/p99 propagation target. Gateways enforce freeze_epoch and a freshness window. CRLs and “rotate keys later” are for museums.

“TLS for Agents” Mapping (So The CIO Nods And Signs)

Certs → AECs (short-lived, environment-bound)

Handshake → Mint Gate + Policy (prove PoP + measured runtime)

mTLS → Mutual Verification (gateway checks AEC + proofs)

CRL/OCSP → FREEZE + freshness (deterministic revocation)

CT logs → Custody ledger (append-only, lineage + co-signed transfers)

Where it’s stronger than TLS: authorization is baked in (allowlists, datasets), delegation is safe (co-signed, monotonic), and revocation is time-bounded. Where the analogy stops: this is capability issuance and enforcement, not a wire cipher suite.

What It Kills Dead

Static keys in agents. Torched.

Prompt-induced tool sprawl. Gateways read the tool_allowlist claim. Out-of-policy calls bounce.

Shadow plugin superpowers. Plugins are custodians; installs mint scoped AECs only if the plugin build attests to approved digests. Freeze the plugin, brick the power—everywhere.

“We couldn’t reach the issuer.” Don’t care. Proofs are offline. Decide locally.

Minimum Demo To Stop Hand-Waving

Agent boots inside a measured container. Emits attestation: image hash, model ID, prompt template commit, dataset snapshot IDs.

Mint AEC with claims: env_digest, tool_allowlist, dataset_snapshot, policy_version, lineage_hash, freeze_epoch, short TTL.

Tool gateway validates AEC + proof bundle offline. Denies any call not on the allowlist or stale by freshness.

Trigger FREEZE(plugin=“reports-writer”). Show that calls fail across the fleet within the promised p95 window. No “please reboot the agent.” No “clear your cache.”

If your platform can’t do this in a week, your platform is the problem. Call me.

Implementation Notes (Because Someone Will Ask)

Attestation schema (keep it boring & strict): agent_id, agent_code_digest, container_image_digest, model_id, model_weights_checksum, prompt_template_commit, dataset_snapshot_ids, tool_allowlist, network_egress_policy_id, evidence_timestamp.

Token binding: Put env_digest, lineage_hash, policy_version, freeze_epoch, and tool_allowlist into the AEC claims. Resource servers check those or deny.

Delegation: TRANSFER events require both parties’ signatures and next-sequence = prev+1. Cache the lineage commitment to detect replay.

Revocation math: You set freshness windows that conservative security teams can sleep with. The rest is just clock discipline and distribution.

SOC2 candy: Emit deterministic decision records (lineage, policy, timestamps). Auditors stop camping in your calendar.

Objections, Pre-butchered

“But our gateway runs mTLS!” Cute. mTLS tells you who reached the door, not what runtime is holding the keys, nor what they’re allowed to touch right now.

“This is just CT + OIDC?” Then CT must’ve grown co-signed custody TRANSFER, bounded FREEZE, offline quorum proofs, and attestation-gated mint while I wasn’t looking.

“Won’t this slow us down?” Only if your idea of “velocity” is letting an LLM rummage through prod with a skeleton key. Tokens are short; verification is local. The line moves faster when the rules are deterministic.

The Part You’ll Try To Skip (Don’t)

Kill the long-lived keys. No exceptions. Every “temporary” bypass becomes permanent. Every permanent key becomes an incident postmortem with your name on it.

Bottom Line

You don’t need another guardrail deck. You need a door that doesn’t argue. Evidence → policy → token → go. Change the bag? Prove it again. Drop the bag? You’re out. Misbehave? Freeze, everywhere, on a clock.

Call it “TLS for AI agents” if it helps sales. Under the hood it’s attestation-gated, custody-tracked, offline-verifiable capability issuance. Which is exactly what your agents should have had before you let them anywhere near prod.

Now either wire the gate, or keep explaining to the board why the chatbot had write access to payroll.