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. 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. …