Same credential, different right answer
The tooling is adopting scoped agent identity just as a new draft shows that a valid identity still cannot decide whether an action is allowed now.
How we Build
The Model Context Protocol’s new roadmap
Agent identity is one of the five priorities. The protocol’s authorisation was written for a person approving access in a browser, and the callers now are agents acting for a user who has gone home, or handing a slice of their authority onward. The direction named is a scoped, short-lived identity per agent, built on standards that exist.
We tell clients that an agent acts as a named identity whose authority narrows each time it is passed on. Clients used to ask whether that was a real requirement or a consultant’s taste. The answer now sits on the protocol’s own blog. A roadmap is a direction, and the delegation path is unfinished.
How we Assure
An IETF draft for per-action authorisation
A scoped credential answers who an agent is and what it may generally do. The draft pulls out a second question: whether this action, with these values, may run now. Budgets move, approvals lapse, somebody throws a kill switch, and the credential stays valid while the right answer changes.
Our position is that an agent should carry a credential of its own, narrow and short-lived and traceable to a name. Nothing here disputes that. What it shows is that our check has stopped discriminating: the check reads the credential, and the credential was decided when it was cut. This is one author’s work in progress.
Trivy, not LiteLLM, behind the compromise
Of the 2,188 organisations with records in the LiteLLM data, 2,085 had stopped collecting before the poisoned packages were published. The exposure sat upstream, in a security scanner running in the build pipeline; LiteLLM gave the incident its name and was downstream of all of it.
We judge exposure across the estate rather than one use case. A firm treating this as the LiteLLM problem would have checked which version it ran, and looked straight past where nineteen in twenty exposures sat.