August 2026 Summaries

Agent Relay and the Ratify Protocol team are exploring how autonomous agents from different organizations can securely communicate and collaborate without relying on direct trust or real-time verification from an authority. Ratify provides delegated-authority proofs, analogous to verifiable permission slips, enabling agents to demonstrate what actions they are authorized to perform. In an initial test involving two simulated companies and Claude and Codex agents, six scenarios were evaluated, including four attempted unauthorized actions, which were rejected within milliseconds with verifiable explanations. The teams found that general permissions, such as authorization to write files, were insufficient because they did not restrict access to a specific repository or path; after identifying shortcomings in an application-level check, they moved enforcement to the operating system kernel. The next phase will extend Ratify’s SDK to bind permissions to specific repositories and files, followed by an end-to-end demonstration of agents from separate Relay deployments conducting authorized work across a network.