Authentication and user management platform company Descope Inc. today announced the launch of Agentic Identity Hub, a platform that helps organizations solve authentication and authorization challenges for artificial intelligence agents, systems and workflows.

The new platform includes the ability to provide apps with an easy way to become agent-ready while requiring user consent. That provides agents a scalable way to connect with more than 50 third-party tools and enterprise systems. In turn, that helps developers using model context protocol — Anthropic PBC’s open-source standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives — protect their MCP servers with purpose-built authorization application programming interfaces and software development kits.

The platform seeks to address the issue wherein agents, large language models and other AI systems have become increasingly embedded into enterprise and consumer workflows. As a result, developers are struggling to securely connect AI systems to external software-as-a-service tools and ensure that their own apps properly authenticate AI agents with the right level of access and human oversight.

Descope argues that as the industry converges on a few key standards to power identity infrastructure for agentic builds, such as 0Auth and MCP, developers face the choice between spending time to become experts in these protocols to build and manage authentication for AI systems, or risking identity spoofing, tool misuse, privilege compromise and other threats.

The new Agentic Identity Hub addresses these issues with capabilities that include support for inbound apps, providing every application an easy way to become its own identity provider using the OAuth standard. Doing so allows AI agents to authenticate, access authorized user data and take scoped actions securely on behalf of users with their explicit consent.

For outbound apps, the platform provides AI agent builders a secure, scalable way to connect AI agents to external tools without having to manually manage and store tokens, scopes and permissions. Developers have a choice of more than 50 out-of-the-box tool integration templates, including support for Gmail, HubSpot Inc., GitHub Inc., Snowflake Inc., Slack Technologies Inc., Notion Labs Inc. and Shopify Inc.

The new platform also provides support for MCP Auth software development kits and APIs to help developers build and manage remote MCP servers to secure their systems with robust authorization controls, as well as extend the MCP servers’ functionality by connecting them with multiple OAuth-based services.

“As AI systems make our lives easier, we must ensure the lives of developers building AI don’t become harder,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Slavik Markovich. “The Agentic Identity Hub provides a set of tools to help developers spend more time on the interesting work of building and fine-tuning their AI systems and hardly any time on the nitty-gritty of authentication and access control.”

Descope is a venture capital-backed startup that last raised a round of $53 million in February 2023. Investors in the company include Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital, TechAviv Founder Partners LP, Circa Capital Corp. and J Ventures.

Image: Descope