Most AI chatbots reach a backend API the same way any other service does: a client credentials grant and a static scope. That model breaks down fast once the chatbot is acting on behalf of a specific user, and breaks down again once you want to know which agent did what.
Toby Allen
Solutions Engineer at Okta. I write about identity, access management, and security. This site archives my published articles, talks, and presentations.
Series - Indepth Explainers
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Four more bugs: applying last week's lesson in the wrong place
· Auth0, MCP, AI Agents
A live user hit a broken appeal submission on an error from the exact family the previous post had just spent two sessions solving. It wasn't the same bug - the earlier fix's own assumption didn't hold for a second hop, and two more unrelated bugs were stacked underneath it.
Three bugs Claude Code and I only caught by checking the wrong layer
· Auth0, Next.js, AI Agents
Building out an Auth0 Organizations demo suite with Claude Code, three separate bugs all had the same shape: the verification looked complete, and was still checking a different layer to the one where the failure actually lived.
Six checks later: the on-behalf-of bug that took two sessions to find
· Auth0, MCP, AI Agents
On-behalf-of token exchange for the apidays demo's MCP server failed with the same generic error no matter what I tried. Six separate, individually correct verification passes across two sessions all checked the wrong property of the one field that mattered.
Five bugs in one afternoon: what a real click found that Claude's own checks never did
· Auth0 FGA, AI Agents, MCP
Claude Code built the caseworker admin console for my apidays workshop demo and every check it ran passed - type check, lint, build, direct FGA queries. The first time I actually clicked the button, we found five separate bugs, one in each layer of the stack.
What's New in the Auth0 Session and Token Guide: Token Vault and Session Delegation
· Auth0, Customer Identity Products, Identity Security
Four separate follow-up posts are now folded into the main guide instead of sitting as bolted-on updates at the bottom - two new grant types for devices with no browser of their own, and two new use cases worth building around: Token Vault and Session Delegation.