Building a zero-trust network for AI agents: mutual authentication, private-by-default routing, and why it matters

The phrase "zero trust" gets applied to a lot of things that aren't really zero trust. In most agent infrastructure today, "secure" means "behind a VPN" or "talking over TLS." That's transport security. It's not the same thing. Zero trust for agents means something more specific: every connection is mutually authenticated before anything is exchanged, every agent has a cryptographic identity that persists across restarts and cloud migrations, and private routing is the default, not an opt-in you