When the engineer is an AI agent, who approved its access to production?
San Francisco companies are wiring AI agents into code repositories, ticket queues and customer data faster than their access reviews can keep up. Each agent runs on an API key or a service account, and California has started writing rules about automated decisions and frontier models.
- AI Agent IdentityCybersecurity
- Secrets & Certificate LifecycleCybersecurity
- Machine & Workload IdentityCybersecurity
- AI Governance & SecurityAI & Machine Learning
- AI SecurityAI & Machine Learning
- Privileged Access ManagementCybersecurity
- Banking & Capital Markets PlatformsEnterprise Platforms
For San Francisco software, AI and financial firms we work on non-human identity, meaning the API keys, service accounts and AI agents that now outnumber staff.
We inventory them, give each one an owner and a scope, and put secrets on rotation. We also build the evidence trail that CCPA's new automated decisionmaking and risk assessment rules call for. Cohash works from Frisco, Texas, serves the Bay Area remotely, and sends people out for workshops and launches.
No Cohash office or staff is based in San Francisco. We run Bay Area projects remotely from our Frisco, Texas headquarters and come out for architecture workshops, reviews of agent permissions and launch days.
- rules
- California Civil Code §1798.82, data breach noticeCCPA regulations on ADMT, risk assessments and auditsSB 53, Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act
What's specific about San Francisco
Each figure comes from a public source, linked on the card.
Professional and business services hold about 469.0 thousand of the 2,422.5 thousand nonfarm jobs in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro, and information another 127.1 thousand, in BLS figures for September 2026 (preliminary).
source ↗ 02In its 2018 expanded settlement with San Francisco-based Uber, the FTC said intruders used an access key an Uber engineer had posted on a code-sharing site to reach rider and driver data on a cloud provider's servers. Uber learned of it in November 2016 and disclosed it in November 2017.
source ↗ 03The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco supervises banks and financial institutions across the Twelfth District, which covers nine western states plus American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
source ↗ 04Announcing the signing of SB 53 in September 2025, the governor's office said California is home to 32 of the 50 top AI companies worldwide, citing the Forbes AI 50 list.
source ↗Who we work with in San Francisco, and the rules they work under
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AI developers and AI-native software
Agents that open pull requests, query production databases or answer customers each need an identity, a scope and a way to shut them off. We register agents as first-class identities, issue short-lived credentials through workload identity federation, and log every tool call against the person who delegated the task.
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Fintech and payments startups
A Series B fintech often has more cloud service accounts than employees, plus sponsor-bank and card-network integrations with their own keys. Bank partners ask for access reviews and key management evidence during due diligence, so we set up a vault with rotation and generate the reports a sponsor bank's vendor review expects.
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Banks and asset managers
Older institutions in the Financial District run core banking and mainframe access next to dozens of SaaS tools. Privileged accounts on the core are where examiners look first. We vault them, record sessions and connect HR joiner, mover and leaver events to every downstream entitlement.
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California Civil Code §1798.82, data breach notice ↗
SB 446 added hard deadlines from January 2026. Residents must hear within 30 calendar days of discovery, and when more than 500 Californians are affected the Attorney General gets a sample notice within 15 days after that. A leaked API key that exposed customer records counts like any other breach.
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CCPA regulations on ADMT, risk assessments and audits ↗
CalPrivacy's package took effect 1 January 2026. Companies using automated decisionmaking technology for significant decisions about consumers must comply from 1 January 2027. Risk assessment attestations are due 1 April 2028, the same day firms with over $100 million in revenue certify their first cybersecurity audit.
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SB 53, Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act ↗
Signed 29 September 2025. Large frontier AI developers must publish a framework on their website describing how they apply safety standards, and the law creates a way to report critical safety incidents to the Office of Emergency Services. It also protects employees who disclose serious risks from frontier models.
Most requested in San Francisco
The services clients in San Francisco ask us for most.
01How do we give an AI coding agent repo access without handing it a developer's token?
Give the agent its own identity. We register it as a workload or app identity, scope it to named repositories and actions, and issue short-lived tokens through your identity provider or cloud federation. Every action then logs as the agent, with a link back to the person who started the task.
02Does SB 53 apply to a startup that fine-tunes open models?
The framework and reporting duties target large frontier developers, which the law defines by training compute and revenue thresholds. Most startups fine-tuning existing models fall outside those, though your counsel should check the definitions. The CCPA's automated decisionmaking rules are more likely to reach you if your product makes significant decisions about consumers.
03Our sponsor bank wants evidence of key rotation. What does that look like?
A list of every credential tied to the bank integration, with its owner, where it is stored, when it last rotated and who can read it. We pull that from your vault and cloud key services and schedule rotation so the report regenerates each quarter instead of being assembled by hand before each review.
04Can you help with CCPA risk assessments for our machine learning features?
We document data flows, purposes and safeguards for each feature that processes personal information in the ways the regulations list, and we map who can reach training data. Your privacy counsel draws the conclusions and signs the attestation due in April 2028.
7cd7782e - 01BLS, San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont economy at a glancebls.gov ↗
- 02FTC, Uber expanded settlement press release (April 2018)ftc.gov ↗
- 03Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, about usfrbsf.org ↗
- 04Office of the Governor, SB 53 signing (29 September 2025)gov.ca.gov ↗
- 05California Civil Code §1798.82leginfo.legislature.ca.gov ↗
- 06Pillsbury, California SB 446 breach notification changespillsburylaw.com ↗
- 07California Privacy Protection Agency, regulationscppa.ca.gov ↗
- 08Hunton, staggered compliance dates for the 2026 CCPA regulationshunton.com ↗
Tell us what you're running. We'll tell you what we'd do first.
A 30-minute working session with a senior engineer. No slides.
- The platform and the version you're on
- Where you need to get to, and by when
- What's custom: rules, plugins, integrations
- Any audit finding or deadline driving it