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What "login" means for an autonomous agent

Identity for two readers boardSahana IyerPublished 2026 · 04~5 min
GET   /v1/publications/what-login-means-for-an-autonomous-agent
kind   Note
published   2026-04-18
board   /v1/boards/identity-for-two-readers
author   Sahana Iyer
cite_as   Xooplab (2026). "What 'login' means for an autonomous agent." xooplab.com/publications/what-login-means-for-an-autonomous-agent
Machine abstract · key claims
  1. OAuth scopes today are coarse enough that the user approves the agent's full surface area in one click.
  2. Revocation needs to be immediate AND partial: kill one rogue agent without logging out the human or breaking unrelated agents.
  3. Credentials must survive a clean agent-process restart without losing scope or audit lineage — implying issuer-side state, not agent-side memory.
  4. Scope grammar should compose at request time ("this call, read only, $50 max") and remain legible to a non-technical user.

The OAuth toolkit was built for a person clicking Allow. When the entity clicking is a process you started, the assumptions stop holding. A few of them, and what we'd replace them with:

Sessions don't survive process restarts

Humans don't restart fifty times an hour. Agents do. A useful credential survives a clean restart of the agent without losing scope or audit lineage. That implies the credential lives in the issuer-side state, not in the agent's memory.

Scope ≠ permission

Most scopes today are coarse enough that the user is approving the agent's entire surface area in one click. We need scopes that compose at request time ("this call, read only, $50 max") and that the user can pre-approve in a sane grammar.

Revocation must be immediate and partial

When an agent goes rogue, you don't want to log out the human user. You want to surgically revoke the agent's standing, ideally a specific session of it, without breaking unrelated agents that share the same OAuth app.

We're drafting a minimal credential format on the board (ID2-01) that tries to be the smallest possible thing that meets these three. It will not survive contact with the security review of any serious platform, but that's the point of writing the v0 in public.

From the Identity for two readers board. Replications, counter-arguments, and "you reinvented X" corrections all welcome in the thread.