Descope Launches Agentic Identity Hub to Simplify Authentication for AI Agents and Workflows

Descope, a platform specializing in authentication and user management, has announced the launch of its Agentic Identity Hub. This new platform assists organizations in addressing the challenges of authentication and authorization for AI agents, systems, and workflows.

The platform offers a straightforward way for applications to become agent-ready while requiring user consent. It enables agents to connect to over 50 third-party tools and enterprise systems in a scalable manner. This helps secure MCP servers using model context protocol — an open-source standard developed by Anthropic PBC that connects AI assistants to the systems where data resides — through purpose-built authorization APIs and SDKs.

Designed to tackle the growing integration of agents, large language models, and other AI systems into enterprise and consumer workflows, the platform addresses the challenges developers face when securely connecting AI systems to external SaaS tools and ensuring proper validation of AI agents' access rights alongside human oversight.

Descope points out that as the industry converges on key standards like OAuth and MCP to support identity infrastructure for agent building, developers face the choice of either becoming experts in these protocols to build and manage AI system authentication or risking threats like identity spoofing, tool misuse, compromised permissions, and more.

The new Agentic Identity Hub resolves these issues by supporting inbound application functionality, providing each application with a simple way to act as its own identity provider using OAuth standards. This allows AI agents to securely authenticate, access authorized user data, and perform scoped actions only with explicit user consent.

For outbound applications, the platform provides builders of AI agents with a secure and scalable method to connect AI agents to external tools without manually managing tokens, scopes, and permissions. Developers can choose from over 50 ready-to-use tool integration templates, including support for Gmail, HubSpot, GitHub, Snowflake, Slack, Notion, and Shopify.

The platform also supports the MCP Auth SDK and API, helping developers build and manage remote MCP servers, securing their systems with robust authorization controls, and extending the capabilities of MCP servers by integrating them with multiple OAuth-based services.

"As AI systems make our lives easier, we must ensure that the lives of developers building those AI systems don’t become more difficult," said Slavik Markovich, co-founder and CEO. "Agentic Identity Hub provides a set of tools that help developers spend more time on the interesting work of building and fine-tuning AI systems and far less time on the minutiae of authentication and access control."

Descope is a venture-backed startup that recently raised $53 million in funding in February 2023. Its investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital, TechAviv Founder Partners LP, Circa Capital Corp., and J Ventures.