Agent identity, mandates, and the prompt-injection kill chain for systems where a manipulated agent can wire funds to the wrong account.
The Agentic Commerce Stack and MCP as Product Strategy cover building agent systems. This covers defending one that moves money, where a prompt-injection attack stopped being an embarrassing chatbot output and became a wrong-account wire.
You will design agent identity, signed mandates, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints, trace the promptware kill chain end to end, and red-team your own agent payment flow. It dovetails with Major Labs’ own agent-safety primitives.
Agent identity is not employee IAM with a new logo on it. We unpack why the model we inherited breaks the moment an agent touches money, and what that means for anyone building on it.
Proving which agent is calling does nothing to prove the call matches what the human actually asked for. This lesson maps the gap between authentication and intent, and why it is the exact seam prompt injection exploits.
Why agents should never run on the spawning user's service account, and how SPIFFE attestation plus OAuth token exchange give each agent a per-task, short-lived, attestable identity.
How the Agent Payments Protocol turns a user's instruction into a signed, verifiable credential, and what its three-mandate chain does for authorization that a session token cannot.
One injected instruction can ride an agent's own authorized tools from initial access to a finished wire. We trace the stages and where each one breaks.
A money-moving agent should never hold a direct connection to a payment API. We route every tool call through a gateway that enforces an allowlist and the smallest set of capabilities the job actually needs.
How to place, tier, and engineer approval checkpoints so a human catches the money-moving actions that matter, without turning every agent run into a queue of rubber stamps.
How to build append-only, cryptographically verifiable audit logs so that an autonomous agent's actions can never be silently deleted or rewritten after the fact.
A practical method for attacking your own agent payment flow before an adversary does, covering the threat model, a repeatable attack catalog, and how to turn findings into regression tests.
We assemble the whole course into one end-to-end flow, tracing a single agent purchase through identity, mandates, the gateway, human review, and the audit log. Use it as a checklist for what a money-moving agent path must include before it ships.