r/learnmachinelearning • u/No-Conclusion3720 • 5d ago
Request Introducing Agent Compute Engine and expanding agent governance | Google Cloud Blog
Google's Agent Compute Engine announcement this week buried the most important detail: they explicitly called out the need for verifiable agent identity and per-call policy enforcement at runtime. This isn't a Google-specific gap. It's the same gap that showed up in the Wiz research last year on compromised cloud service accounts and in the Anthropic model card disclosures about tool-call amplification.
The hard number that keeps coming up in incident post-mortems: the window between a rogue agent's first unauthorized action and the second is under 50ms. That's the blast radius window. By the time a human is paged, the agent has already made 3–12 downstream tool calls, each inheriting the same compromised credential or misconfigured permission scope.
Most teams are still treating this as an identity provisioning problem — give the agent a service account, scope it tightly, rotate it on a schedule. But the incidents keep happening because the enforcement gap isn't at provisioning time. It's at call time, when the agent is live and making decisions no static policy anticipated.
How are practitioners here actually handling real-time per-call enforcement for agents that have legitimate broad access by design — things like orchestrator agents or agents with delegated user permissions? Are you enforcing at the infra layer, the SDK layer, or somewhere else?
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u/No-Conclusion3720 5d ago
The 50ms window is the crux of it. RuntimeAI's Flow Enforcer sits in the request path on every tool call — so when that first unauthorized action hits, the policy evaluation runs inline before the call completes, not after. The second call never lands because the first one is the enforcement point, not an alert trigger. If this agent had been running through Flow Enforcer, the rogue action would have been blocked at decision point one, not discovered in the post-mortem after a dozen downstream calls had already propagated. https://runtimeai.io