Access control stops at login
IAM assumes a person signing in. Agents make thousands of calls an hour on borrowed credentials, with no identity of their own and no policy on what they call.
Access control has always governed people. Software got a service account and did what it was told, line by line.
Agents ended that. They decide what to call, when, and with what arguments, and they do it with whatever credential was in the environment. The question is no longer whether a person may log in, but whether this piece of software may make this exact call on this person's behalf. Alter answers that question on every request.
The tools you have were built for a different problem
Building it yourself
Months of undifferentiated work
- Every provider means OAuth quirks, refresh logic, retry behavior, and storage you now own
- Rotation, revocation, and audit get bolted on later, usually after the first incident
- None of it is your product
A secrets manager
Stores the secret, then hands it back
- The credential still ends up in your process, your logs, your prompts
- No notion of which agent is calling, for whom, or whether it should
- Nothing pauses a dangerous call for a human
Your IdP or IAM
Governs people logging in, not agents calling out
- Built for a person at a keyboard with a session, not software making thousands of calls
- No per-agent identity, no per-call policy, no delegation chain
- Your IdP stops at login; Alter governs the calls that come after
Evaluating a specific one?See Alter next to it, capability by capability.
What Alter does differently
The secret never leaves
Alter sits in the request path. Credentials are injected on the way out and the response comes back; your code and your agents handle API results, never keys.
Decisions happen per call
Not per session, not per deploy. Scope, time, network, and rate are evaluated as each request happens, and the default answer is no.
A human gate on any call
Any call can be routed to a named person. The request freezes, gets reviewed exactly as it will execute, and runs only after approval.
The record cannot quietly change
Append-only, hash-linked, blocked from updates at the database layer. When something goes wrong, the answer exists and holds up.
Ready to secure your agents?
Book a 30-minute walkthrough with the founders.