What is Permit.io?
Permit.io is a modern authorization platform built specifically for the age of AI agents. Unlike traditional identity systems designed for human users, Permit.io gives you real-time, fine-grained control over what AI agents can do—every time they take an action, across every system they touch. This means no more risky standing permissions or static API keys that leave your data exposed.
As AI agents become more common in enterprise software, healthcare, fintech, and government systems, legacy IAM tools simply can’t keep up. Agents are dynamic, context-sensitive, and often unpredictable. Permit.io solves this by treating each agent action like a unique authorization event—verified at runtime based on identity, intent, context, and policy—so you stay secure without slowing innovation.
What are the features of Permit.io?
- Agentic-Native Identity: Creates dynamic identities for AI agents by “interrogating” their intent via MCP; if a prompt injection changes behavior, access is automatically denied.
- Action-Time Authorization: Enforces policies at the exact moment an action occurs—not just at login—ensuring least-privilege access for every request.
- Unified Policy Fabric: Combines RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC in one system, supporting policy-as-code, GitOps, and embedded approval workflows.
- Defense in Depth Architecture: Secures the full chain—from agent prompts to database rows—with gateways, application-level PDPs, and data-layer enforcement.
- Human-to-Agent Delegation: Lets users safely delegate access to AI agents within strict, policy-defined boundaries, including explicit consent flows.
- Real-Time Audit & Tracing: Logs every authorization decision with full context, enabling end-to-end visibility from human to agent to data.
- Hybrid Deployment: Offers sub-millisecond latency with in-VPC policy decision points (PDPs), available as managed or self-hosted.
- Open & Integrable: Built on OPA and OPAL, works with your existing IdP, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.
What are the use cases of Permit.io?
- Secure AI customer support agents that access sensitive user accounts without granting broad system permissions.
- Enable healthcare AI assistants to query patient records while enforcing HIPAA-compliant row- and column-level access controls.
- Allow fintech trading bots to execute transactions only within pre-approved risk limits and with real-time compliance checks.
- Protect government systems where AI tools analyze classified data but must never exceed scoped, auditable permissions.
- Give developers safe sandboxed access for AI code-generation agents that interact with production databases.
- Implement zero-trust workflows for internal AI tools that chain multiple services (e.g., CRM → billing → analytics).
How to use Permit.io?
- Start by placing the Permit.io gateway URL in front of your upstream MCP server to intercept and evaluate agent requests.
- Define fine-grained policies using Permit’s policy engine—supporting RBAC, ABAC, or relationship-based rules—in code or via UI.
- Integrate Permit’s SDKs or APIs into your applications and data layers to enforce decisions close to the workload.
- Set up human consent flows so users explicitly approve what actions their delegated AI agents can perform.
- Monitor and audit all decisions through centralized logs that trace every step from prompt to data access.
- Deploy PDPs in your VPC for low-latency, high-scale authorization without sending traffic outside your network.
