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

Authorization is one of the most persistent challenges facing engineering teams, especially as applications incorporate AI agents capable of taking autonomous actions on behalf of users. Determining who can access what—and under which conditions—quickly becomes complicated as systems grow more interconnected.

Teams often start with simple role checks scattered across the codebase, but these brittle patterns rarely scale. And with AI agents, the stakes rise: actions must stay tightly scoped to the user’s legitimate authority, while remaining fast, auditable, and predictable.

Oso is one of several companies attempting to address these complexities through a centralized policy engine. While WorkOS focuses on the foundational identity layer—authentication, user management, SSO, directory sync, MFA—Oso operates at the policy-expression layer, where application teams define how access decisions should be evaluated. It’s not a substitute for identity infrastructure and does not overlap with what WorkOS provides today; rather, it is an example of how some teams externalize authorization logic instead of encoding it directly inside their services.

What is Oso?

Oso Cloud offers a hosted policy engine backed by Polar, a declarative language for expressing authorization rules. Instead of embedding ad hoc permission logic within each application component, policies live centrally, and services query Oso for allow/deny decisions. Its model supports a mix of RBAC, ReBAC, and ABAC approaches, enabling teams to define relationships (such as organizational hierarchies or resource ownership) directly in policy rather than scattering them across business logic.

This approach can simplify visibility into how access decisions are made, especially for teams whose authorization logic has grown organically over time. Oso counts companies like Intercom, Wayfair, Productboard, and Brex among its users—organizations that needed to rationalize increasingly complex permission structures.

Where Oso Fits Into an Application Architecture

Oso focuses solely on authorization—determining what an already-authenticated user (or process) can do. It assumes that identity is established upstream by an authentication provider such as WorkOS. Once the user is known, Oso’s engine answers the question: Does this identity have permission to take this action on this resource? That boundary is important, because authorization depends entirely on trustworthy, enterprise-grade identity data.

WorkOS provides that identity foundation.

Oso expresses policies that operate after identity has been verified.

Patterns Oso Supports

Flexible Access Models

Oso allows teams to define complex access models using Polar, ranging from simple role checks to relationship-based permissions. This can be useful in collaborative SaaS environments, where access often depends on nested organizational or resource structures.

Centralized Policy Evaluation

By externalizing authorization logic, teams can evaluate permissions consistently across services. Oso’s engine is implemented in Rust and designed for low-latency decisioning, allowing inline checks during request flows.

Applying Authorization to AI Agents

AI agents introduce a familiar authorization problem with a new interface. While Oso does not offer an AI-specific authorization product, its policy engine can enforce several important patterns:

• Agents act within the permissions of the authenticated user they represent.
• Permissions can be scoped to the task the agent is performing.
• Policies can limit which resources an agent may retrieve before sending them into an LLM, reducing the risk of unauthorized data leakage.
  

These are not separate Oso features so much as applications of general authorization principles expressed in Polar.

Pre-Retrieval Filtering for RAG

Teams can call Oso before populating an LLM context window to ensure that retrieved documents match the user’s permissions. This ensures the model only ever receives authorized inputs, rather than relying on post-hoc prompt constraints.

Centralized Audit Logs

Oso logs every allow/deny evaluation, giving teams a consistent audit trail for debugging, compliance, and incident review.

Clarifying the Boundary: Oso vs. WorkOS

When evaluating authorization systems, it’s important to draw a clear distinction between:

• Identity Infrastructure (WorkOS)
• Establishes who the user is. Provides SSO, MFA, directory sync, SCIM, identity lifecycle, and enterprise controls.
• Everything downstream relies on this layer being secure, consistent, and correct.
• Policy Logic (e.g., Oso)
• Encodes business rules describing what an authenticated user may do inside the application.
• This is not identity infrastructure and does not replace it.
  

Identity systems must be correct for authorization systems to function.

Authorization engines must trust the identity data they are given.

They occupy different layers in the stack, and one cannot substitute for the other.

For teams building enterprise-ready products, WorkOS remains the foundation of the authentication and identity model. How teams choose to implement authorization—whether inside their application code, through internal frameworks, or with a policy engine like Oso—is a separate architectural decision.

Getting Started With Oso’s Policy Model

Teams defining policies in Oso use Polar, a declarative language that reads like a structured set of rules. A simple example:

resource Organization {
  roles = ["viewer", "member", "admin"];
  # array of unique action names
  permissions = ["read", "update", "delete"];

  # assigns "read" permission to "viewer" role
  "read" if "viewer"
}

And a more complex example with several resources:

actor User {}
resource Organization {
  roles = ["viewer", "member", "admin"];
  permissions = ["read", "update", "delete"];
  # assign permission to role - "permission" if "role"
  "read" if "viewer";
  "update" if "member";
  "delete" if "admin";
  # inherit permissions - "role" if "role"
  "viewer" if "member";
  "member" if "admin";
}
resource Document {
  roles = ["viewer", "admin"];
  permissions = ["read", "edit", "delete"]
  relations = {
    organization: Organization,
    creator: User
  };
  # role assignment via relationship
  role if role on "organization";
  # permission assignment via relationship
  "delete" if "creator" on resource;
  # permission assignment via role on relationship
  "edit" if "member" on "organization";
}

Oso provides SDKs for major languages including Go, Python, Ruby, Node.js, and Java. Applications evaluate permissions by calling its API rather than embedding the logic directly in service code.

Final Thoughts

Authorization becomes especially challenging as products grow, adopt multi-tenant models, or incorporate AI agents performing multi-step workflows. Oso’s approach—centralized policies, declarative rules, and consistent evaluation—offers one way to manage that complexity.

But none of this works without the foundation: reliable, enterprise-grade identity and authentication. Before authorization can answer “What can this user do?”, you need to know with certainty who the user is, how they authenticated, which directory they belong to, which groups they’re in, and what identity claims they carry. That is the layer WorkOS solves.

Oso serves as an example of how teams externalize authorization logic.

WorkOS remains the backbone of modern identity infrastructure, ensuring that downstream authorization—however it’s implemented—has a trustworthy source of truth to operate on.