| A badge and a login |
A key copied from a colleague’s laptop, shared by several agents. |
Identity and keys. The agent holds a decoy. owno swaps in the real key at the moment of use, so a stolen key opens nothing. |
| A manager |
A team, a service account, or nobody. |
An owner. One named person, with a backup. When they leave, responsibility passes automatically. |
| A job description |
A prompt somebody edited last quarter. |
A mission. What the agent is for, and which tools it may use. owno checks that its work matches its mission. |
| A spending limit |
Discovered on the invoice, after the month closed. |
Budgets. Per day and per month, on models and on tools, with an alert before the limit and a stop at it. |
| Company rules |
A document nothing reads at the moment of the action. |
Policy at the action. Checked at the instant the agent tries to act, not in a report afterwards. |
| A work log |
Partial logs in six tools that never meet. |
The ledger. Every action, job and work item in one place: who, what, which rule allowed it, what it cost, what came of it. |
| A performance review |
Nothing. The agent is rewritten often and nobody checks. |
Tests and a scoreboard. Built from the agent’s own real cases, run before every prompt, tool or model change. |
| A promotion |
Either fully supervised or fully loose, chosen once. |
Earned autonomy. After enough approved decisions with no incidents, owno proposes acting alone and the owner signs. |
| Training after a mistake |
Someone edits the prompt. Nothing checks it. |
The improvement loop. Every incident becomes a test, and often a rule, with the change that would have prevented it named. |
| The file for the auditor |
Screenshots and a spreadsheet, assembled by hand. |
Evidence packets. A signed extract of the ledger, verifiable without an owno account. |
| Offboarding |
The agent is switched off. Its keys stay live. |
Retirement with proof. Keys revoked, data purged, a signed artefact that says so. |