Top AI Product

Letting an AI agent act on production systems raises an obvious question: what is it actually allowed to do, and who says so? Alter, a Y Combinator startup, answers that with a zero-trust identity and access control platform built specifically for AI agents.

## What Alter does

Alter wraps every tool call an agent makes in strong authentication, fine-grained authorization, and real-time guardrails. Each request is verified at the parameter level, checked against granular policies, and executed with least-privilege access, with unsafe actions blocked before they reach production. Rather than handing an agent a standing API key, Alter issues ephemeral, scope-narrowed credentials for each interaction and then rotates or expires them within seconds — so a compromised or misbehaving agent has little it can abuse.

## Why enterprises care

Traditional identity systems were designed for humans logging in a few times a day, not agents firing high-frequency actions at machine speed. Alter targets that gap, with compliance support for SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR plus a CISO-ready dashboard offering real-time visibility and audit logs. The pitch to security teams is simple: let the agents move fast, but make every action authenticated, authorized, and logged.