How to Let AI Agents Act on Your Behalf Without Losing Control

Imagine your flight gets cancelled at 2 AM. Instead of spending an hour on hold rebooking everything yourself, your AI agent handles it—rebooking your flight, adjusting your hotel check-in, and updating your rental car pickup, all while you sleep.

Sounds great, right? Until you think about the security nightmare of actually implementing this: How do you give an agent enough access to act for you without giving it the keys to your entire digital life?

This is the real problem with AI agents today. Companies are racing to deploy agents that can book travel, manage schedules, and coordinate with vendors. But the traditional approach is binary: either lock agents down so tightly they can’t do anything useful, or give them broad access and hope nothing goes wrong.

Atsign’s atPlatform solves this with a fundamentally different approach: Restricted Access Agents (RAAs) that can act as you, but only for exactly what you want them to do.

The Problems Everyone Faces with AI Agents

When AI agents need to work across companies and systems, three core issues emerge:

1. The Trust Problem: Your agent needs to prove it’s authorized to act on your behalf. Today, that means sharing API keys or credentials that could be stolen or misused.
2. The Permission Problem: If you give an agent access to your calendar to reschedule meetings, it can often read every private appointment or delete anything it wants. What you need is “just-enough” permissions, but you’re forced into “all-or-nothing” access.
3. The Coordination Problem: When agents need to talk across different companies (airline, hotel, car rental), they hit a wall of different authentication systems and security requirements. Most organizations are rightfully hesitant to open their internal infrastructure to a “mess” of external bots.

How atPlatform Solves These Problems: atSigns

The atPlatform solves these challenges by making every AI agent uniquely addressable through an atSign. An atSign (like @travel_bot) serves as a secure, persistent, cryptographically verified digital identity that allows agents to find and communicate with each other directly, without relying on centralized servers or vulnerable API keys.

1. Solving the Trust Problem: Verified Identity

Instead of sharing passwords or API keys, each agent gets its own unique atSign backed by cryptographic verification. Think of it like a digital passport:

• When @travel_bot contacts the airline’s @customer_service_agent, both sides instantly verify each other’s identity using public-key cryptography.
• No passwords to steal, no credentials to leak.
• If one agent is compromised, it has no “master key” to access your other digital assets.

2. Solving the Permission Problem: Scoped Delegation

The atPlatform allows agents to operate “on behalf of” a user without inheriting their full digital identity. This is achieved through APKAM (App-specific Public Key Authentication Mechanism). This creates a quad-boundary security model:

• Identity Delegation: The @travel_bot authenticates as @colin, but only with a unique cryptographic signature assigned to that specific bot.
• Namespace-Based Data Access: Through “namespaces,” you wall off your data. Your @travel_bot might have access to the travel namespace, but it is physically unable to see data in your banking or health namespaces.
• Capability Boundaries: You can authorize a bot to request a modification, but require a manual signature from you to finalize a payment above a certain threshold.
• Temporal Boundaries (TTL): You can set a Time to Live (TTL) on an agent’s authority. For example, your travel agent is only authorized to act on your behalf for the duration of your trip. Once the trip ends, its “on behalf of” keys automatically expire.

3. Solving the Coordination Problem: Private, Universal Interaction

To solve the mess of cross-company coordination, the atPlatform provides a “low-touch” deployment model that works across organizational boundaries:

• Zero Infrastructure Changes: This is the key for enterprise adoption. Organizations do not need to change any existing security measures, reconfigure firewalls, or modify network architecture. Because agents use outbound-only connections, they stay invisible to the public internet—there are no open ports for an attacker to find.
• Universal Protocol: Because every agent uses the same underlying atProtocol, they can communicate instantly. This eliminates the need for bespoke, expensive custom integrations between every pair of companies.
• Drop-in Security: You gain secure agent coordination without touching your existing security stack. It’s a “private network” experience that runs over the public internet.

See It In Action: A Travel Emergency

Let’s make this concrete. It’s 2:01 AM and your flight tomorrow is cancelled. Your @travel_bot (acting as @colin) springs into action:

1. Authenticates to the airline’s agent via APKAM as your authorized representative. Its authorization includes a TTL—it can only act as you until your return flight lands on Sunday.
2. Finds alternative flights using only your travel namespace data (it cannot see your banking info, medical records, etc.).
3. Coordinates with the hotel and car rental agents over a private, encrypted connection that stays invisible to the public internet.
4. Finalizes the bookings across all three companies in seconds.

At 2:17 AM, you get one notification: “Your 9 AM flight was cancelled. I’ve rebooked you on the 11 AM flight, adjusted your hotel check-in to 3 PM, and moved your car rental pickup to 3:30 PM. An upgrade to first class is available for $120—approve?”

You tap “approve” and go back to sleep.

The Bottom Line

AI agents will transform how businesses operate—but only if we can deploy them securely at scale. The question isn’t whether to use agents, but how to give them enough authority to be useful without giving them enough access to be dangerous.

The atPlatform, through its use of atSigns, solves this by building security into the identity itself, rather than bolting it on afterward. The result is a system where agents work together securely, permissions are granular, authority is time-limited, and you always maintain ultimate control.

The atPlatform is an open-source, full-stack platform created by Atsign for developing applications and services that prioritize security, privacy, and data control.