Demo: two owners, two authorities

One agent, one key, two owners. They give opposite answers and nothing anywhere has to reconcile them.

Left screen — Terminal, ~/uma4agents Right screen — two portals, portal.uma.lab and carol-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 the portals load 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 (alice / alice-demo) and https://carol-portal.uma.lab (carol / carol-demo) side by side.

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

Running it again. No reset needed — a fresh agent key each run, so both owners are always asked.

make k8s-reset

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

Two portals on the right. Answer the two requests differently — the disagreement is the demo, and it is the part no other model of this can do.

0 · Terminal. Show the whole lab first. Two things to point at: alice and carol are separate namespaces with a uma-as each. Two authorities, not one server with two rows in a table.

make k8s-status

1 · Terminal. Point an agent at Carol's account. Meridian holds her account and Alice's. Carol runs her own authorization server, her own signing key, her own identity provider — she is not a tenant of Alice's.

make kagent RESOURCE=carol

2 · Terminal — tier 1 · holdings. Read the challenge line out loud. It names carol-as.uma.lab. Nothing in the agent picked that — the resource published which authority speaks for it, which is the only reason an owner gets to choose one at all.

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

3 · Carol's portal — Approve. Held for her. Carol allows it: SCHD, IEFA, TLT. Her holdings, from her vault, under terms she wrote. Alice has no part in this and never hears about it.

4 · Terminal. Same agent, same key, same tool — different owner. The only thing that changed is whose resource is being asked about. This time the challenge names alice-as.uma.lab.

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

5 · Alice's portal — Deny. Refused. Alice refuses the identical request. They disagreed, and nothing had to reconcile them. No owner sits above them, neither authority was told what the other decided, and no part of the system had to hold both answers at once. Add a third owner, or a thousandth, the same way.

6 · Both portals — Settings → Security → Agent Authorization. Two ledgers, and neither mentions the other. Carol's records a grant she allowed. Alice's records a refusal she made. Same agent in both, and each account of it is only its own owner's.