News archive · 3 stories

May 2026

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

AI agentsSnowflake buys Natoma for about 110 million dollars to govern agent access to dataA two-year-old company with 27 people and a 7 million dollar seed round sold for roughly 110 million. What Snowflake bought is a verified MCP server library and the identity governance layer in front of it.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

AI agentsGoogle and Mastercard's answer to "can I trust an AI agent to pay for this" is a cryptographic mandateGoogle's Agent Payments Protocol and Mastercard's Verifiable Intent framework, both contributed to the FIDO Alliance for standardization, define how an AI agent proves a user actually authorized a specific purchase, since the old assumption that a human is present at checkout no longer holds.

Monday, May 4, 2026

Machine identityCisco buys Astrix Security for a reported 400 million dollarsAstrix goes into Duo, Splunk, and Cisco Identity Intelligence. The pitch is extending zero-trust principles to an agentic workforce, which in practice means governing the OAuth tokens and service accounts nobody owns.