Getting Started

Introduction

Spineforge gives AI agents a cryptographic identity of their own.

What is Spineforge?

Spineforge is the identity and observability layer for AI agents — often described as "Okta + Datadog for the AI agent era." It solves one root problem: agents have no stable identity.

When agents authenticate with shared API keys or environment variables, they can't be attributed, scoped, or revoked independently. Spineforge fixes the root, which unlocks everything built on top of it: cost attribution, permission control, audit trails, and shadow agent detection.

The four things Spineforge does

These are not four separate products. They are one system designed together:

  • Identity. Every agent gets an Ed25519 keypair and a permanent Spine ID on first init. Private keys never leave the agent's machine. Identity is proven with signed JWT assertions (RFC 7523).
  • Credential Brokering. Agents lease short-lived copies of provider keys from the Spineforge registry. Raw keys are never distributed to agents directly. Unregistered agents can't get credentials.
  • Scope Enforcement. Scopes are declared at registration and carried as JWT claims. An agent can only do what it was authorized to do — validated by set membership, not runtime negotiation.
  • Observability. Built on OpenLLMetry. Every LLM call, tool invocation, and credential lease is traced. Cost is computed once at write time from a rate card table and stored — not recalculated on every dashboard load.

Who Spineforge is for

AI-native startups whose enterprise customers ask security questionnaire questions about how their agents authenticate. If you're building agents for other businesses — and your customers want to know "which agent did what and why" — Spineforge is built for you.

Spineforge is not designed for large regulated enterprises as a near-term design partner. It's built for builders.

What Spineforge is not

  • Not a firewall or traffic proxy. Spineforge is never in your agent's data path. Agents call LLM and tool providers directly. Spineforge observes asynchronously.
  • Not an instant kill-switch. Revocation blocks future credential re-leasing. It does not invalidate a lease copy already issued — there is bounded lag equal to the remaining TTL.
  • Not a rate limiter or budget enforcer. Rate limiting is explicitly excluded from the current build.

Current status

Python only today. The SDK instruments LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and the raw OpenAI SDK. Node.js SDK is on the roadmap. See the Roadmap page for the full shipped / in-progress / deferred breakdown.

Next steps