AI agents need privileged access built for them
IAM assumes a person signing in, and traditional PAM assumes a person in a session. Agents make thousands of API 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
Traditional PAM
Grants access windows; agents need per-action decisions
- Built to vault admin passwords and record people's sessions on infrastructure
- An agent's risk is in the SaaS API call it makes, not in a login session
- Controls are organised around sessions and secrets, not the endpoint and parameters of each API call
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
Proxied calls never expose the secret
Alter sits in the request path. Calls routed through the proxy have the credential injected on the way out, so agents handle API results, not keys. Proxy-only agent keys make that the only path.
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, the approver reviews a summary of it, and it 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.
Put your agents under privileged access control.
Book a 30-minute walkthrough with the founders.