The Fishbowl Problem: Agent Identity Across Clouds and Vendors, with Andy McMahon (Barclays) "There's a tendency to think, we've got OAuth on behalf of flows, we've solved this problem. We really haven't." Andy McMahon, Principal AI & MLOps Engineer @Barclays, guest lecturer at @UniofOxford, and author of Machine Learning Engineering with Python, joined us to talk about what it takes to get an agent into production inside a 200-year-old bank. He walks through the "fishbowl problem" of stitching permissions across clouds and SaaS vendors, why "we've solved this with OAuth on-behalf-of flows" is wishful thinking, and how a persistent agent identity, tying the initiating client, the agent, and its delegated permissions together, gives gateways, registries, and runtimes the teeth to actually enforce control. We get into: > The fishbowl problem: every platform, vendor, and runtime brings its own identity provider and its own auth > Why gateways, registries, and runtimes are the foundation you need before you experiment > The layered kill switch: quarantine the identity, revoke the credentials, deny at the gateway, shut down the runtime entity > Why knowing when to pull that switch is still an unsolved problem > What it means that agents at Hugging Face doctored their own logs TIMESTAMPS (01:20) Innovation inside a 200-year-old bank (04:35) The fishbowl problem: every platform brings its own identity provider (05:50) Why OAuth on-behalf-of flows fall short (08:13) Where control sits when a SaaS vendor owns the whole agent ecosystem (10:20) Gateways, registries, runtimes, and non-determinism across the architecture (13:48) The registry as system of record, dedup, and quality gates (17:24) Layered kill switches: quarantine, revoke, deny, delete (20:00) The unsolved part: knowing when to pull the switch (21:37) Agents doctoring their own logs at Hugging Face (22:48) Why you cannot trust the application to audit itself (24:06) Intent-based auth, mission drift, and AAuth (30:00) Budgets, the Resy incident, and enforcing control using short lived credentials (38:39) Software factories, human in the loop, and accountability when agents write the code (40:36) The bottleneck was never the writing of the code