Write agent policies for the groups you already have

The Gatehouse team · October 16, 2026 · 2 min read

Most companies already know who should be able to do what. It's written down in Active Directory, in Entra ID or Okta, in groups like Payments-Engineering, SRE-OnCall and Contractors. A security team shouldn't have to rebuild that list by hand to decide what AI agents may do.

Gatehouse now has groups, and they can come from the directory you already run.

Policies for groups and people

A policy's For whom can now combine groups and individual people. "Allow Data and these two auditors to query the analytics replica." "Require approval from SRE for production deploys, for everyone except Platform." Someone matches if they are in any listed group or are listed by name. Deny still wins over everything.

Each group has its own page. It shows the members, every policy that applies to the group, and every policy the group approves for. Rename a group and every policy that names it is updated with it.

Active Directory and LDAP

For on-premises Active Directory, and for self-hosted installs that can't reach a cloud identity provider, Gatehouse connects to a domain controller over LDAPS with a read-only account. You pick groups by name, like GH-*. On a schedule, Gatehouse:

resolves nested groups, so members of Backend count as members of Engineering,
creates accounts for new members,
disables people who are disabled or deleted in AD, revoking every agent token at once,
re-enables people the directory turns back on.

It only reads from the directory. Nothing is installed on your domain controllers and no inbound port is opened. If you have no SSO provider, people can also sign in with their directory password, with two-step verification on top.

Entra ID, Okta and SAML

Cloud directories have two routes. SCIM pushes people and groups the moment they change. A groups claim at sign-in lets Gatehouse read the person's groups from the OpenID Connect token or SAML assertion and map them to Gatehouse groups. This includes Entra ID's group object IDs and the names Okta, Keycloak and ADFS send.

Why it matters for agents

Agents act with a person's access. When that person changes teams or leaves, the agent's access has to change at the same moment, not at the next quarterly review. Group membership is checked on every tool call, so a change in AD reaches every agent within one sync.

Read Groups and Active Directory and LDAP to get started.