Agentic Runtime Authority Intro

Problems with AI Agents in Production

There are two critical problems today with AI agents running in your production environments; secrets exposure and uncontrolled agent behavior.

Secrets Exposure

Let's start with secrets exposure. When developers connect LLMs to applications through a normal MCP server, they generally paste the passwords, API keys, and tokens straight into the config file. This one decision drops long-lived, exposed secrets into the developer's environment and hands the agent open-ended access into critical systems. It is fast to set up and dangerous by design.

Akeyless solves this by ensuring zero secrets are exposed to the LLM by using a secretless MCP connector that brokers all connections to applications.

Uncontrolled Agent Behaviors

Now let's move to the problem of uncontrolled agent behavior. Current approaches enable securing authentication and access, but they were not designed for autonomous AI agents. User intent does not equal LLM behavior in practice which makes the outcome unpredictable and leaves your systems exposed to destructive actions by the LLM.

Akeyless solves this problem. The Agentic Runtime Authority enforces security at the moment of action, not just at access - providing intent-aware authorization with dynamic access that checks and intercepts each request in real time ensuring your systems are protected.

Agentic Runtime Authority Workflow

Let's see the entire flow. It starts with a user prompt to Claude for data in a database. The data request is made by Claude. It is intercepted by the Agentic Runtime Authority, which checks the input as well as Claude's permissions, and intent. It then uses a just-in-time secret to access the database. The database sends back the requested information. The runtime authority then checks the output of the data to determine it is valid to return to the user while ensuring that policies are enforced. Once approved, Agentic Runtime Authority allows Claude to send the data back to the user.

In summary, Agentic Runtime Authority ensures the agent holds zero credentials which means there's nothing to steal. It provides real-time, intent-aware authorization by granting the agent least-privileged permissions at the exact moment of action and continuously verifying them against the outcome. And, in addition, it provides full traceability and logging of all actions performed by the agent on the target system, from prompt to action.