Zero Trust for Agentic Systems — trust, safety, and security for agents. @mvpzone
What Is Not Attested
There is a foundational claim at the centre of agentic Zero Trust: what is not attested is neither real nor true. An action without an attestation is not a smaller version of a governed action — it is outside the system of record entirely. If it left no verifiable trace, you cannot prove it happened, and you cannot prove it didn’t.
Refusal Is Not Free
A team builds a conservative policy engine: anytime the agent’s planned action falls outside a narrow allow-list, it refuses. It feels safe. But refusal has a cost — every over-refusal is a capability withheld, and a system that refuses too much is not safer, it is useless. Bounded action is priced, not free.
The Forensic Ledger
An agent fails in production: three minutes, forty-seven decisions, twenty-three actions, one harmful output. The team needs to know which decision led to it, and what state the agent held when it chose. Recoverable failure is not the absence of failure — it is a forensic ledger that lets you walk it back.