Alter Launches Access Control Platform for Multi-User Agents

Backed byCombinator (opens in a new tab)

Privileged access management

for AI agents.

Control what agents can do on behalf of each user. Enforce policy, keep credentials private, and audit every action.

Book a demo (opens in a new tab)Start in 10 minutesAlter Vault | Authorization Enginegnt_7x92kIncoming RequestAsales-agentagent: ai_agentGET api.github.com/user/reposPolicy Evaluation✓Identity verified✓Scope check: repo✓Rate limit: 847 / 1,000✓Token refreshed (3m ago)Authorization ResultAPPROVEDInjected HeadersAuthorization: Bearer ghp_••••••••k4m2X-Alter-Grant: gnt_7x92kAudit Logaction: token.proxyagent: sales-agenttarget: github.comstatus: 200 OKlatency: 142ms140 integrationsIn-path enforcementSOC 2 in progress

Give agents their own keys, not yours.

Without Alter

.envOPENAI_API_KEYsystem-prompt.mdSLACK_BOT_TOKENci-config.yamlSTRIPE_SECRET_KEY

Keys scattered everywhere

Pasted into prompts, configs, and .env files across every repo.

admin-key-prodused by: all 14 agents

One key does everything

Every agent borrows the same over-scoped credential.

Who refunded that charge?No results found.

No answers afterward

Nobody can say which agent did what, or on whose behalf.

With Alter

vault: 3 credentialsinjected per request

One vault

Stored once and injected per request, so proxied calls keep it out of your code.

billing-agent · refunds approval

Least privilege per agent

Each agent gets its own identity and scopes, with a human gate where you want one.

Who refunded that charge?billing-agent, for finance-ops, 14, approved by J. Lee

Every action on the record

A tamper-evident trail with a name attached to every call.

Building agents

Pass your customers' security review

• Per-agent identity and scoped grants instead of one shared key
• Policy and human approval a customer's security team can inspect
• An audit trail you can hand to a reviewer, streamed to their SIEM

The security review, answered

Securing agents

PAM controls for a new kind of privileged user

• See every call an agent makes through Alter: which agent, whose access, which policy, who approved
• Default-deny policy down to the parameter, and approval for risky calls
• Revoke an agent, key or grant instantly; IdP webhooks cascade offboarding

PAM for AI agentsHow it works

Alter authenticates, authorizes, and logs every request

One SDK call handles storage, refresh, policy, and audit for 140 providers. First-class LangChain, MCP, and AWS integrations.

Agent reads calendar with authorized scopescheduling-agent→GETgoogleapis.com/calendar/v3/eventsEVALUATING…SDK requestToken + API callOAuth consentYOUR INTEGRATIONSMCP ServersAI AgentsChatbotsAppsConnectVaultPolicyAuditEXTERNAL SERVICESOAuth + API keysEND USERSAuthorize via ConnectEvent Log1User authorized Google Calendar via Connect widget2Scheduling agent requests calendar access via SDK3Identity verified · Policy: scope=calendar.readonly · APPROVED4Token decrypted · GET googleapis.com/calendar/v3 · 200 OK5Logged: scheduling-agent → calendar.readonly → APPROVEDEND USERSAuthorize via ConnectOAuth consentYOUR INTEGRATIONSMCP ServersAI AgentsChatbotsAppsSDK requestConnectVaultPolicyAuditToken + API callEXTERNAL SERVICESGoogleSlackGitHubSalesforceNotionLinearOAuth + API keysEvent Log1User authorized Google Calendar via Connect widget2Scheduling agent requests calendar access via SDK3Identity verified · Policy: scope=calendar.readonly · APPROVED4Token decrypted · GET googleapis.com/calendar/v3 · 200 OK5Logged: scheduling-agent → calendar.readonly → APPROVEDPlatform

One platform between your agents and every API

Four features on a single request path.

[### Credential Vault

Store credentials once. Agents use them without ever seeing them.](https://alterauth.com/platform/features#vault)[### Policy Engine

Each request checked against your rules. Deny by default.](https://alterauth.com/platform/features#policies)[### Agent Identity

Per-agent keys and scopes, traceable to a real person.](https://alterauth.com/platform/features#identity)[### Human in the loop

Sensitive calls wait for a named person. Everything else flows.](https://alterauth.com/platform/features#human-in-the-loop)[### Compliance & Audit

A record you can hand to an auditor, streamed to your SIEM.](https://alterauth.com/platform/compliance)[### See the whole platform

The full request path, end to end, on one page.](https://alterauth.com/platform)Use cases

What teams build on Alter

Every card is a working guide with code.

[### Call APIs on behalf of users (opens the guide in a new tab)

Run OAuth, Connect, and identity-aware token retrieval end to end.](https://docs.alterauth.com/guides/call-apis-on-behalf-of-users)[### Give an AI agent scoped access (opens the guide in a new tab)

The agent gets its own identity, its user grants, and its own audit trail.](https://docs.alterauth.com/guides/give-an-agent-scoped-access)[### Provision secrets for backend services (opens the guide in a new tab)

Store API keys and service tokens in Alter instead of environment variables.](https://docs.alterauth.com/guides/provision-secrets-for-backend-services)[### Expose credentials to Claude Code (opens the guide in a new tab)

Build your own MCP server that serves Alter-managed credentials as tools.](https://docs.alterauth.com/guides/integrate-with-claude-code-mcp)[### Partition agent memory by identity (opens the guide in a new tab)

Key memory, sessions, and channels by verified identity, never by what the LLM claims.](https://docs.alterauth.com/guides/propagate-identity-to-memory)[### Build a multi-user server (opens the guide in a new tab)

Serve many users from one service without the credential entering your process.](https://docs.alterauth.com/guides/build-a-multi-user-server)

How the platform itself is secured

• Credentials live in a dedicated secret store, encrypted at rest, with keys managed outside the application database
• Fail-closed authorization: if a policy cannot be evaluated, the request is denied
• Zero-trust ownership: a key confers no capability without an explicit record naming it
• Postgres holds metadata and vault references; provider tokens and credentials live only in the vault
• Per-key isolation, plaintext credentials never in logs, and proxy-only keys that cannot retrieve a credential at all

Compliance & audit

Controls monitored continuously

SOC 2 in progress

Our trust center publishes the live state of our security program: monitored controls, an independent penetration test within the last 12 months, and security policy documents on request.

Visit the trust center (opens in a new tab)

Put your agents under privileged access control.

Book a 30-minute walkthrough with the founders.

Book a demo (opens in a new tab)Start in 10 minutes

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作者发帖说明（HN）：

Hi HN! We’re Srikar and Kevan, founders of Alter – https://alterauth.com/. We’re building access control for agents that can take actions on behalf of multiple users.

If you’ve built an internal agent people use through Slack, you may have experienced this scenario: everyone signs in with their own account, but the agent connects to the CRM or billing system with one shared API key, so the agent can do anything that the key can do. User-level authentication in Slack does nothing to control what the agent can do in an external system like the CRM or billing system.

Here’s what Alter does:

-It acts as a proxy and manages downstream credentials for every API request that an agent takes;

-It takes identity into account for every action the agent does. Automatically take into account the end user identity of the person that the agent is taking actions on behalf of.

-It enforces fine grained runtime policies and records compliance grade audit logs.

Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZqPU14ipGE

We started this because we saw first hand how hard it is to build agents in regulated industries. To unlock the true benefits of agents we need to allow agents to take actions, sometimes actions on behalf of end users. I (Srikar) was working at Goldmans and I saw how prohibitively expensive it was for me as a developer to write my own custom auth to enable multi-tenancy in agents and to allow ag...