Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs

While OpenAI and Anthropic stoke fears over rogue agents, Canadian model dev Cohere promises enterprises a safer and more consistent experience. On Monday, the company said it revamped its North agent harness, which launched early last year, to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security of the platform.

As you'd expect from an enterprise focused agent framework, Cohere's North 2 is designed to tie into existing knowledge bases and SaaS apps in order to automate various business processes.

North 2 introduces a variety of features and functions that should be familiar to anyone who's used Claude Code or OpenClaw. Among them is the concept of skills, libraries, and automations.

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Skills are arguably the simplest, and are essentially standard operating procedures documenting how the agent harness should complete tasks. The skills are often generated by working with the agent to complete a task and then documenting which steps achieved the best results.

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With North 2, Cohere says that it has made it easier for these skills to be shared so that users aren't wasting time reinventing the wheel. Presumably, this should improve consistency by avoiding having the agent take different routes to achieving its goal, something that might miss key information or nuance.

To facilitate the creation of new skills, North 2 also introduces the concept of automations, generic templates that can be customized using a drag-and-drop graphical interface, not unlike LangFlow, which we looked at earlier this year.

Alongside skills and automations, Cohere's North 2 does something similar for shared knowledge and assets, which it calls libraries, to ensure that agents are working off of the same datasets. Finally, North 2 adds memory, a core feature of most modern agent harnesses, to ensure that agents can maintain context across multiple sessions.

In some sense, these features are a bit like self-generating macros, but rather than being limited to Excel, they work across multiple applications and data sources.

Sovereign AI remains a major talking point for Cohere, which says enterprises can deploy North 2 where they like and use their preferred models. If enterprises want to deploy the harness on-prem in an air-gapped environment, they can. If they prefer to run it in the cloud, that's also an option.

Along with new features aimed at collaboration and automation, North 2 implements new guardrails designed to help enterprises get a handle on their token spend and access controls.

Flow control functionality, meanwhile, promises greater visibility into which departments are hogging all the tokens, while access control functionality offers admins the ability to assign access control lists to various libraries and skills so that interns can't get their hands on proprietary data just because they asked for it.

North 2 is only the latest in a slew of enterprise focused agentic AI platforms which have been rolled out over the last year. Essentially every major and minor cloud provider has introduced some kind of agent harness tailored to enterprise needs. The competition has only gotten hotter over the last few weeks as OpenAI, Meta and others have set their sights on the enterprise. ®