Network Deployment Engineer

GoDaddy, Google and Cloudflare unveil AI agent trust system. techcoffeehouse GoDaddy, Infoblox, Google and Cloudflare have unveiled a system for verifying the identity of AI agents as they move through a transaction, developed in partnership with Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). Called the Chain of Trust, the open reference architecture was demonstrated at GovWare 2026 during Singapore International Cyber Week, and is built on principles from IMDA's Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI (v1.5). It lets organisations discover, identify and authenticate AI agents at every step of a transaction, even when the agents involved have never interacted before and run on different platforms. Agent-led commerce is growing fast. AI agents are already being used to search for products, compare prices and make purchases on behalf of people and businesses. McKinsey & Co estimates AI agents could facilitate between US$3 trillion and US$5 trillion in global consumer purchases by 2030. The problem, according to the companies behind the project, is that most platforms today verify agents through closed systems, leaving businesses with little visibility into how an agent's identity was checked or whether it can be trusted. The Chain of Trust addresses this by building on existing, open internet standards, including DNS, OAuth and the Model Context Protocol, so trust can be verified independently across clouds and platforms rather than inside a single vendor's walled garden. Live demo simulated a flight purchase between strangers. At GovWare, the four companies demonstrated a complete agentic purchase of a flight from Madrid to Singapore between agents that had never interacted before and ran on different platforms. The buyer agent ran on Amazon Web Services, the seller agent on Cloudflare Workers, and the mandate authority and verifier agent on Google. A person approved the purchase with a passkey, which triggered a signed Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) mandate setting what the buyer agent could purchase, from whom and up to what amount. The buyer agent found the seller through DNS-based discovery, checked its identity against a public log, and verified its trust score before completing the purchase. The demo also included attempts by a look-alike seller using forged credentials, which the system stopped before any transaction occurred. "Realising the potential of agentic AI will require trusted and interoperable foundations that can support responsible deployment at scale," said Lee Wan Sie, cluster director for AI governance and safety at IMDA. "Robust agent identity will be a key part of that." "We don't need to rebuild the internet for AI agents. By extending the open standards that have connected the internet for decades, we can give agents a verifiable identity that works across platforms," said Jared Sine, chief strategy and legal officer at GoDaddy. Wei Chen, executive vice president of regulatory strategy at Infoblox, said the project extends DNS and other established internet standards to agent discovery and identity verification, "helping create a system where businesses can independently verify who they're dealing with, without relying on a single platform to decide who can be trusted." Rao Surapaneni, vice president for Gemini Enterprise and Agent Governance Platform at Google Cloud AI, and Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Cloudflare, also took part in the demonstration. The companies have published a technical case study and invited domain registrars, identity providers, payment networks and cloud and AI platforms to adopt and extend the architecture. Share with your friends:

Cloudflare says Gateway Forward enters public beta. Cloudflare says the beta lets customer-written code change web requests and responses, while separate data loss prevention checks launch to validate detections before enforcement. Cloudflare says it has opened a public beta of Gateway Forward, which sends selected web traffic to customer-written code, and launched separate custom validation functions for data loss prevention (DLP). In its October 15 announcement, the company describes two ways for security teams to add their own logic: changing requests and responses, or checking sensitive-data detections before deciding whether to enforce a policy.[1] Cloudflare Gateway already evaluates and enforces security rules on user traffic. Cloudflare Workers already runs customer-written code on the company's network. The integration connects those services, allowing teams to add traffic-processing logic without hosting a separate proxy - a server that handles web traffic on a user's behalf - Cloudflare says.[1] How Forward handles traffic. According to Cloudflare, Forward rules are evaluated only for traffic that HTTP policies have already allowed. HTTP is the protocol used for web requests and responses. The first matching Forward rule sends the request to its assigned Worker; subsequent Forward rules do not also process that request.[1] The Worker receives the request's full headers and body, Cloudflare says. Customer code can change either, send the request to the destination server, receive and change the response, and return it to the user. Gateway continues to manage connections, certificates and encryption, while the Worker handles the customer's processing logic.[1] Cloudflare proposes access-justification pages as one possible use: a Worker could pause a request to a sensitive destination, ask the user for a written reason and record that response. This is an example of what customers could build, not a reported deployment result.[1] Checking a detection before enforcement. Cloudflare says its DLP custom validation functions are available now, separately from the forthcoming Gateway Custom Functions. DLP tools look for sensitive data using patterns and other checks. A pattern match alone does not establish whether that particular data indicates theft or misuse, the company explains.[1] The new validation step runs after a DLP detection matches but before a policy-enforcement decision. Cloudflare says customers can use a Worker to check the detected data against their own authoritative records, then use the result to decide whether the DLP profile should match the traffic.[1] Charges, live-traffic risks and the next release. Traffic sent to Workers is billed as standard Worker requests, Cloudflare says. The integration supports Workers Free, Paid and Enterprise, but the free plan has execution-time and daily-request limits. Those limits matter as teams send more Gateway traffic to their code.[1] Cloudflare cautions that Forward code changes users' live requests and responses. The company says teams must target and design these Workers carefully to avoid harming the user's experience.[1] Cloudflare expects Gateway Custom Functions before the end of 2026. Unlike Forward's proxy processing, these functions will return a text, number or true-or-false value that Gateway can use in network or HTTP rule conditions. Cloudflare says each function will require default values and configurable fallback behavior for failures, timeouts or unexpected results, giving teams a defined response when their custom check cannot complete.[1] Sources. Follow AveNews on X Join the list for future editions.

Block, Amazon, Synopsys and Cloudflare are rethinking how work gets done with AI. 2 hours ago 21 Good morning. Block's leaders didn't want to sprinkle AI on top of existing work. "We thought about fundamentally refactoring how we operate as a company," Amrita Ahuja, Block's CFO and COO, said during a panel I moderated at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, where she was joined by leaders from Synopsys, Cloudflare, and Amazon. Over the past few years, the fintech company has been consolidating and simplifying its processes and using AI in the business since early 2024. Earlier this year, Block, the parent company of Square and Cash App, cut its workforce by 40% and removed layers of management. "We fundamentally believe that in a world of AI, you absolutely need the human at the center," Ahuja said. You still need people in every function who are builders, goal-setters, and strategy deciders, she said. But you no longer need a person whose job is to pass information along or check work before it reaches the actual reviewer, she added. At Block, engineers improved their code review changes by 150% between the start of the year and midyear, and "even non-engineers have a 60% improvement," Ahuja said, adding that 15% of code changes are now almost fully automated - meaning "there's only a human in the loop at the end for the final decision," she said. Measuring the return is still evolving, though. Much of the industry is still weighing AI costs against personnel savings, she said. Block is working to refine a metric it calls "timed customer value," which would trace a code change to a feature, then to a customer interaction, and finally to value. For Synopsys, a company that develops software for designing and verifying semiconductors, CFO Shelagh Glaser said the cost side got real fast. AI spending "was pretty reasonable until it wasn't," she said, comparing employees' usage habits to snacks in the break room. Synopsys had to decide who gets premium tiers and who uses internal models. It also built its own metering system when some providers didn't offer one. The goal is to be "super intentional about where that investment is," with returns measured in customer outcomes, not just product releases. Cloudflare co-founder and President Michelle Zatlyn, whose company provides web infrastructure and cybersecurity services, said the company now hires "both employees and agents" and wants all of its roughly 5,000 people to be builders across the business. One standout was a finance director who made extensive use of agents and whom the CFO tapped to lead AI transformation for the finance team, Zatlyn said. Cloudflare also committed to hiring more than 1,000 interns in 2026, and they've helped teams become more AI-native, she said. "The important thing as a leader right now is to make sure that you're giving time and space and permission for your teams to learn," Heather Zorn, Amazon's VP of customer experience, products, and services said. The company is able to measure returns on investment in how employees use AI through measuring adoption first, then engagement, and then efficiency through outcomes like time saved, Zorn said. "You want to create something that wins for the customer, and then you have to find a way that it wins for the business as well," she said. Leaders also have to figure out how long they're willing to invest before seeing both wins, she added. Ahuja said she expects more companies to integrate AI agents into their organizational charts, with workers responsible for both training and deploying these agents. "Where things are headed - and I've already heard about a couple of companies doing this, so we're on the frontier - is you look at your work chart that your company publishes, and it will have not only humans, but agents," she said. "Those agents, not too dissimilar to humans, need to be developed over time." Leaderboard. Andrew Hodson was named CFO of PharmaCorp, effective Oct. 27. Hodson takes over from Terri Tatchell, who retires that day. She will stay on as a consultant for three months to help with the handover. Hodson was most recently head of finance at Marshall Land Systems. Before that, he was VP of finance at Vendasta Technologies, where he led the finance work on strategic acquisitions. He also spent six years at Deloitte Canada. Nathan Iles was appointed SVP of finance at Dauch Corporation, a supplier of driveline and metal-forming parts to the auto industry, effective Nov. 2. He will become CFO on Dec. 1, succeeding Christopher May. That same day, May will become EVP and chief administrative officer, keeping the IT organization and taking on executive oversight of HR. Iles brings more than 25 years of finance leadership, most recently as CFO of Standard Motor Products, an auto parts supplier. Before that, he was VP and CFO of UCI International Holdings. Big deal. Many finance teams are adopting AI faster than they can trust what it produces, according to OneStream's first Forward Finance Index, a survey of 1,300 CFOs and other senior finance leaders at mid-market and enterprise companies in the U.S., U.K. and France. Nearly three-quarters (74%) say AI is already cutting manual work in the close, reporting and reconciliation. Yet just 14% say their AI investments have delivered "enterprise value and decision impact." Data is a major obstacle: while 71% are confident their teams provide trusted data for decisions, only 40% describe their financial reporting data as fully transparent, meaning it can be traced, explained and validated. Four in 10 respondents say data quality problems regularly block or delay AI projects. Workforce readiness is another gap: just 15% have a fully embedded AI skills program, even though two-thirds believe failing to prepare their workforce will make their organization irrelevant within five years. Overall, only 6% of finance organizations qualify as leaders across all five areas measured by the index: AI strategy, data, workforce, operations and IT collaboration. More than half (52%) rank as "Followers." OneStream, which sells finance software, argues that leaders treat AI as a change in operating model rather than a series of pilots, grounded in trusted data and a workforce ready for AI. Going deeper. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the AI industry shouldn't accept any cybersecurity incidents caused by the technology, Fortune's Jeremy Kahn and Beatrice Nolan report. "I'm willing to accept no incidents of cybersecurity. We should not accept any of them," Huang told Fortune in an interview in London. Huang argued that the incidents so far could all have been avoided with stronger containment and monitoring of AI agents. You can read more here. Overheard. "As business leaders, we're wired to chase speed, scale and efficiency. However, in our pursuit of bigger, better and faster, we shouldn't lose sight of a key element of lasting success: trust." - Kate Barton, CEO of Dentons law firm, writes in a Fortune opinion piece. * homepage * Fortune magazine * Block, Amazon, Synopsys and Cloudflare are rethinking how work gets done with AI.