Co-founder & CPO, Cerbos · Co-chair, OpenID AuthZEN · London
I co-founded Cerbos, where we build the authorization layer for apps, APIs and, more and more, AI agents. I also co-chair the OpenID Foundation working group behind AuthZEN, the open standard for how software asks that question.
Most months I'm on a stage somewhere talking about it, usually with a live demo I'm quietly hoping works.
Authorization used to live in one codebase. Now every layer makes its own decision, and the failures show up as outages, retry storms and "can't reproduce" tickets. The fix: one policy decision point, coordinated with OpenID AuthZEN.
I run product at Cerbos, which I co-founded with Emre Baran and Charith Ellawala. There's an open-source policy decision point (Apache 2.0), Cerbos Hub to manage policy across a whole fleet of them, and Synapse to fetch the context each decision needs.
cerbos.devI'm one of the co-chairs of the AuthZEN Working Group at the OpenID Foundation. The Authorization API 1.0 went final in January 2026, and in May the group picked up an Outstanding Project award at EIC.
The working groupWith Atul Tulshibagwale I co-author COAZ and its MCP binding, which map any protocol (AI agent tool calls included) onto an AuthZEN request. I wrote the reference implementation so the working group could watch it run.
Reference implementation