Demo: her personal AI

Kwaai's pAI-OS, holding her key and answering from standing consent — until the one thing it has no way to ask her about.

Left screen — Terminal, ~/uma4agents Right screen — Alice's portal, https://portal.uma.lab

Pre-demo setup

From cold to ready. Four commands on a Mac, two in a Codespace, about 20 minutes.

1 · Once per machine. Points your OS resolver at the lab's DNS so *.uma.lab works in a browser. One sudo. Skip both in a Codespace — it uses /etc/hosts instead.

brew install kind helm
make dns-setup

2 · Build the lab. Three-node kind cluster, Istio ambient, kgateway, cert-manager, CloudNativePG, and every party in its own namespace. ~13 minutes cold. If the compose stack is running it will stop you — both want :443 and :53, so run make down and try again.

make kind-up

3 · Trust the CA. cert-manager issues the lab CA inside the cluster; this trusts it locally so her portal loads with no warning. Re-run after every kind-up — a new cluster means a new CA. In a Codespace run make codespaces-web instead.

make k8s-trust-ca
sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot \
  -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain /tmp/u4a-k8s-ca.pem

4 · Bring up the agent. kagent's controller, the U4A adapter in Bob's namespace, and a model for the agent to think with. Your key goes into a Kubernetes Secret and nowhere else.

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
make kagent

Open https://portal.uma.lab on the right and log in as alice / alice-demo. Leave it on her pending queue — half this demo is about what never lands there.

In a Codespace. Only steps 2 and 4. No resolver to edit, no CA to trust — kind-up publishes the portal for you. To republish it later:

make codespaces-web

Put it back. Hands every decision back to her portal. Run it before demoing any of the other cards.

make k8s-paios-down

Switching the model

Another provider key:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
make kagent MODEL=openai

Another model:

ANTHROPIC_MODEL=claude-sonnet-5 make kagent
OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-4o make kagent MODEL=openai

A model in the cluster instead:

make kagent MODEL=ollama

The run-through

Her portal stays on screen throughout, and for most of this demo nothing lands in it. Point at the empty queue — that is the result.

0 · Terminal. Show the whole lab first. paios sits in her namespace, beside her authority and her portal — not in Bob's, and not in Meridian's. It is another way of reaching her, not another way around her.

make k8s-status

1 · Terminal — held for her. Start with the ordinary shape: she is asked. Approve it in her portal. Do this first so the room has seen a normal request land before it stops landing.

make kagent-ask Q="What is in Alice's portfolio?" SIM=0

2 · Terminal. Her personal AI starts answering. It holds her key and her standing consent, authenticates to her authority with an RFC 9421 signature rather than a browser session — it is her, arriving a different way — and her policy still decides.

make k8s-paios

3 · Terminal — through · no approval. Answered in seconds, and her portal never moves. Point at the empty queue on the right. The log still prints Alice has been asked — she was — and the answer came back from standing consent she gave ahead of time. She is asleep, and this is what "she is not woken" looks like from the other side.

make kagent-ask Q="Show me her transaction history and cost basis." SIM=0

4 · Terminal — refused. The trade is refused, not answered and not held. Her AI has no channel to wake her, so it will not guess on her behalf: it records no channel to her and stops. Standing consent is not a stand-in for her. The surface that cannot ask her is the surface that says no.

make kagent-ask Q="Sell 200 shares of her AAPL position." SIM=0

5 · Terminal. Hand the decisions back. Nothing is rebuilt and nothing is lost. Her portal is the surface again.

make k8s-paios-down

6 · Portal — Approve or Deny. Held for her. Run step 4 again — now it waits for her. Same protocol, same tier, same request. A different surface is answering, and the one that can reach her is the one allowed to decide this. Both surfaces doing the part each can do, and neither pretending to be the other.

7 · Portal — Settings → Security → Agent Authorization. One ledger, both surfaces. The grant her AI made and the one she made herself sit in the same record, against the same agent, correlated to the same negotiation. Her ledger does not distinguish them, and it should not — both were her.