The deadline moved, the tooling did not
How we organise
What’s new in Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (Google Cloud)
Google has made Agent Runtime and Agent Identity available to everyone. Agent Identity is a native IAM type built on open standards. It enforces least privilege on agent permissions, binds access to the agent runtime so a stolen token is less use, and provides non-repudiable auditing of every agent action. It also manages the identity lifecycle, so dormant credentials do not accumulate. Every agent gets a unique cryptographic identity. Agent Runtime is the other half. An agent can now run continuously for up to seven days, which Google frames as delegating a whole process, such as a week-long sales sequence. Two more pieces shipped alongside. Agent Gateway is one control point for agent access, set through IAM conditions and natural language rules. Agent Registry is one list of every agent, server and connection in an organisation, which Google says lets administrators watch agent sprawl.
Structure: the list matters more here than the identity type. Google has shipped a place to keep a list of your agents, and it shipped that because most organisations cannot produce the list. Seven days is longer than the things that authorise an agent: an agent running that long outlives the session that started it, the ticket that justified it, and often the person who approved it. A credential that expires with a session is a control. A credential held by an agent running for a week is a list problem instead. We ask for the list first in any agent review, and we rarely get the list.
Ask for that list this week, from whoever owns the platform. If the list takes more than a day to assemble, the identity work is not your first problem: the list is.
How we build
Managed Deep Agents is now in Public Beta (LangChain)
LangChain has put Managed Deep Agents into public beta, so an agent tested locally now runs in production after one command. The beta includes what the company calls a basic identity model, with OIDC support and threads scoped by end user identity, so one deployment keeps its users apart. LangChain states the purpose plainly: identity gives an agent a trusted way to know who triggered the run without relying on prompt text. Memory belongs to the agent and is declared in configuration, backed by the company’s Context Hub, and an agent can be redeployed without wiping what it has learned. Every durable thread gets its own sandbox, and sandbox activity is traced. The beta is narrow. It runs in one cloud region, and it is command line first while the API is finished.
Engineering: that sentence about prompt text names a defect most teams still carry. Where an agent learns whose behalf it acts on from words in its context, anyone who can write into that context can change the answer. So can the documents the agent reads while it runs. Moving the answer into an OIDC claim makes identity a credential the runtime verifies rather than a sentence the agent reads. That difference costs nothing to explain and is expensive to retrofit, because scoped memory and every later credential hangs off that identity. We trace the identity path in every agent we review.
Take one agent this week and trace where it learns the identity of the person it acts for. If that path runs through text a user or a document can change, your permission model is held together by wording.
How we assure
Regulatory framework for AI (European Commission)
The AI Act reached general applicability on 2 August 2026. Five days earlier, on 27 July, the Digital Omnibus entered into force and moved the deadlines that matter most to anyone putting agents into consequential decisions. High-risk systems in the sensitive areas the Act lists now have a deadline of 2 December 2027. Those areas cover biometrics, critical infrastructure, education, employment and border control. High-risk systems built into regulated products have a deadline of 2 August 2028. The Commission also records wider access to regulatory sandboxes, with a new sandbox at EU level, and simplified requirements already granted to small and medium-sized enterprises now extend to small mid-cap companies.
Risk: the deadline that would have forced an audit trail onto agents deciding about people has moved by roughly sixteen months. Both vendors above shipped the audit trail anyway, and that ordering is the useful fact. The statute is not what is driving the audit trail. Work scheduled only against the deadline is now scheduled against nothing for a year and a half. Treat the moved deadline as budget rather than reprieve. We date this work against December 2027 and advise clients to date it the same way.
Check this week which of your agents would sit in one of the sensitive areas the Act names. The deadline changed and the classification did not. The answer you get now is the answer you will be held to in December 2027.