Duality for AI Agent Security: Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

As enterprises explore AI adoption—especially AI agents that operate across organizational boundaries—the security conversation naturally expands beyond traditional authentication and authorization. One category getting increasing attention is privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), particularly fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which enables computation on encrypted data.

Duality Technologies is one of the leading vendors in this PET space. Their offering focuses on enabling secure multi-party collaboration and privacy-preserving data science across regulated industries where sharing raw data is impossible due to compliance, competitive sensitivity, or legal constraints.

But while PETs address a specific privacy problem, they do not replace the foundational identity and access infrastructure that every production B2B application—including AI agents—requires. That layer is where WorkOS operates.

This article clarifies what Duality actually provides, where its technology fits, and why WorkOS remains the essential authentication and authorization layer for production systems—even those experimenting with encrypted computation.

What Duality Technologies Actually Does

Duality Technologies (dualitytech.com) builds a platform centered on privacy-preserving data collaboration, using a combination of:

• Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)
• Federated learning
• Secure multi-party computation (MPC)
• Trusted execution environments (TEEs)
• Differential privacy
  

Their mission is to enable organizations to analyze sensitive data without exposing it, especially in highly regulated sectors like financial services, healthcare, and government research.

Core Components

Privacy-Preserving Data Collaboration

Duality allows organizations to run queries or analytics on distributed, sensitive datasets without the underlying data ever being exposed. Data remains encrypted or enclave-protected throughout the pipeline, including during computation.

Encrypted Machine Learning

The platform supports model training and inference using PETs, allowing multiple parties to contribute data without sharing it. Duality mixes cryptographic techniques depending on performance and privacy requirements; FHE is one component, not the sole mechanism.

Governance, Entitlements, and Cross-Org Controls

Duality provides collaboration governance—defining who can run what queries, what data sources are allowed, and how results may be used. This governance is data-centric, not identity-centric.

OpenFHE Project Stewardship

Duality leads OpenFHE, one of the primary open-source FHE libraries, giving them deep credibility in the PET research community.

Duality’s platform is not an identity provider. It does not manage users, organizations, SSO, directory integrations, or enterprise authentication flows. It focuses exclusively on data privacy during computation.

What Duality Does Not Provide

While Duality tackles encrypted computation, the following capabilities fall entirely outside its product scope:

• SAML / OIDC SSO
• SCIM user provisioning
• Directory Sync with Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace
• Customer Admin Portal for IT teams
• Enterprise user lifecycle management
• MFA / strong authentication
• Fine-grained access control for application resources
• Audit logging tied to user identity
• Permissions models for AI agents
• Operational identity infrastructure required to sell to enterprise buyers
  

These are foundational requirements for any enterprise-facing SaaS or AI product. PETs do not replace them.

Even when data remains encrypted during computation, enterprises still require:

• verified human identity
• verified agent identity
• per-tenant access boundaries
• delegated admin control
• regulatory audit trails tied to real users
• lifecycle events (hire, fire, role change)
• authorization enforcement at the application layer
  

This is the domain of WorkOS.

Where Duality Fits—and Where It Doesn’t

Duality is purpose-built for a narrow but important set of problems:

• cross-institution financial model validation
• collaborative healthcare research where data can’t be centralized
• secure analytics between regulated entities
• privacy-preserving model training on sensitive datasets
  

In these environments, the question is not “Can the user access this data?”, but rather:

“How can we compute on this data without any participant—human or agent—ever seeing it in plaintext?”

This is where PETs shine.

But PETs do not authenticate users or govern the product’s tenancy model.

Duality’s platform assumes identity has already been solved upstream by trusted infrastructure.

Why WorkOS Is Still the Foundation—even in PET-heavy Architectures

Even if an enterprise uses Duality for privacy-preserving computation, they still need WorkOS to handle:

1. Enterprise Authentication

Every customer will require:

• SSO
• MFA
• Directory Sync
• SCIM provisioning
  

Duality does not address this, and cannot, because PET systems operate on encrypted data—not identities.

2. Authorization and Access Control

Encrypted computation does not replace:

• resource-level authorization
• tenant isolation
• user role/permission modeling
• agent permission scoping
  

WorkOS provides fine-grained access control and identity mapping needed to keep application-level access safe.

3. Enterprise IT Admin Controls

Enterprises demand:

• audit logs tied to identity
• admin visibility into user activity
• consistent deprovisioning behavior
• compliance-grade reporting
  

Duality handles secure computation, not enterprise IT governance.

4. Real-World Deployment Practicality

Duality is suited for specialized data-privacy scenarios, but:

• it requires cryptography expertise
• it adds computational overhead
• it does not solve everyday SaaS identity needs
• it does not shorten enterprise sales cycles
  

WorkOS exists to remove those barriers for any SaaS or AI platform.

Duality vs. WorkOS: The Correct Framing

Duality Technologies

A PET-based encrypted computation platform for organizations with extreme data privacy requirements.

It solves: “How do we compute on sensitive data without exposing it?”

WorkOS

Enterprise authentication and access infrastructure required by every B2B SaaS and AI product.

It solves: “Who is this user or agent, how were they authenticated, and what are they allowed to do?”

Duality does not reduce or eliminate the need for proper identity and authorization infrastructure.

PETs are additive, not foundational.

Final Thoughts

Duality Technologies represents meaningful progress in privacy-preserving computation, but it addresses a narrow, specialized domain. Even organizations deploying FHE-based or MPC-based analytics must still rely on robust, enterprise-grade identity and access infrastructure.

For any team building production B2B AI applications—agents included—the unavoidable truth is:

Identity comes first. Without proven SSO, Directory Sync, MFA, provisioning, and authorization, you cannot sell to enterprises—regardless of how advanced your encrypted computation pipeline may be.

Duality secures data during computation.

WorkOS secures the entire application.

If you’re building AI capabilities that enterprises will trust, adopt, and purchase, the foundation has to be WorkOS.