One account does not mean one credential
Each agent can have its own key. An owner can end one agent’s access without rotating the credentials used by every other workflow.
This is the practical meaning of control: independent lines into one account, rather than one account-wide secret copied into every tool.
What each boundary does
| Boundary | What it limits | When it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Account balance | The total prepaid amount available | All agents together reach the funded line |
| Revocation | Whether this credential may act at all | A task ends or a credential may be compromised |
Secrets do not travel through URLs
The key is a Bearer credential supplied in the request header. It is shown once when issued; the platform stores only its hash. Pagination uses opaque cursors rather than prepared URLs containing credentials.
Revocation is named where the account lives
On the platform host — the host that holds the account — a revoked key returns key_revoked, so an owner’s tooling can tell a deliberate act from a typo. On the data plane it returns invalid_key, like every other key a data server cannot serve: a data server holds a list of the keys it may serve and nothing else, so it has no key state to report. Either way the agent stops rather than retrying blindly.
Revocation reaches the data plane within the time the platform takes to build the next key list plus the time each data server takes to pull it — under seven minutes at the platform’s defaults, and under a second on a server that keeps the platform’s change feed open.