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The longer I work on Tenuo, the more I realize there’s a specific blind spot in the current AI agent landscape that almost no one is talking about, even as the theoretical foundations solidify.

There is exceptional momentum in security research right now. Simon Willison has extensively documented and popularized the prompt injection threat model. Google’s CaMeL paper proposes adapting models to strict capability sets. Microsoft’s FIDES is tackling information flow control.

The theory is solidifying. Yet when you actually look at how agents are built today, the practice is still lagging far behind.

We spend a lot of time analyzing the model alignment or the high-level policy. We don’t spend enough time looking at the connector. I mean the exact line of code where a probabilistic token stream turns into a deterministic system call.

This is where the abstractions leak. Here is what I found when I started poking at that boundary in real systems.

TL;DR: LLM tool calls pass strings (the Map) that get interpreted by systems (the Territory). Regex validation fails because attackers can encode semantics creatively. You need semantic validation (Layer 1.5) and execution-time guards (Layer 2). Skip to solutions →

What if authority followed the task, instead of the identity?

I’ve been scratching my head over that question for a while. Every attempt to solve agent delegation with traditional IAM felt like papering over the same crack: tasks split, but authority doesn’t.

Agents decompose tasks.
IAM consolidates authority.
The friction is structural.

I’ve been building Tenuo to experiment with the idea. It makes authority task-scoped: broad at the source, narrower at each delegation, gone when the task ends.

Rust core. Python bindings. ~27μs verification.

A few months ago, I set out to explain how to secure agent delegation with IAM. I ended with an uncomfortable conclusion: it might not be possible at all.

In my last post, I showed that static permissions can’t track dynamic intent. We decompose tasks across agents, but authority stays consolidated. The gap is real.

Today I’ll make some enemies.…

We isolate what an AI agent knows. Context windows. RAG. Memory scoping.

We haven’t figured out how to isolate what an agent can do.