The Passport model

Passport has a small set of concepts. Once they click, the rest of the product reads plainly.

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Workspace

A workspace is a company tenant. It owns its members, connected MCPs, catalog policy, teams, guardrails, settings, audit trail, and billing. Nothing in one workspace is visible to another. A person can belong to more than one workspace and switch between them.

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Members and roles

A member is a person (or a governed agent identity) in a workspace. There are three roles: Deactivating a member (by an admin or through SCIM) signs them out everywhere and revokes their connected-account grants immediately.

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MCP

An MCP is a tool server your team connects to. In Passport an MCP can be one of several kinds: Each MCP has a stable key that namespaces its tools (for example github), and an authentication mode:

• org uses a single company account for everyone.
• member has each person connect their own account (through a real OAuth broker where one is available, or the standard MCP OAuth scheme).
• none needs no upstream auth.

Admins can turn individual tools on or off per MCP, and choose whether newly discovered tools default on or off.

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Passes

A pass is what a person is allowed to do with an MCP. There are three values: Access is resolved from three layers, strongest last: a workspace-wide default (or an explicit “selected people only” scope), then per-team passes, then per-person overrides. Because a read-only pass hides write tools from the tool list, an AI client never sees a capability its user is not permitted to call.

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Teams

A team groups members (it is a member’s department). Teams are the unit you grant passes to, so “Support gets read-only GitHub” is one rule rather than one rule per person. When you provision through SCIM, IdP groups map to Passport teams.

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Bundles

A bundle is a virtual MCP: a named subset of tools drawn from across several MCPs, with its own endpoint. Bundles let you hand an AI client a tight, curated tool set instead of everything a person can reach.

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AI clients

An AI client is the app that calls the gateway. Passport recognizes these clients and knows how each connects: Local and GUI clients can attach through native MCP or the Passport bridge. Hosted clients connect straight to the cloud gateway with browser OAuth. Terminal and headless agents can use Passport CLI, which calls the gateway’s existing governed meta-tools instead of defining a second execution path. For CLI calls, Passport keeps three concepts separate: the cli surface chooses the compact protocol, the client drives policy and per-client app selection, and an optional caller adds self-reported display detail such as codex. The member or agent key remains the authenticated identity. An admin can require that only recognized clients connect, and can allow or forbid members from connecting unlisted clients.

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The gateway

The gateway is the single endpoint both MCP clients and Passport CLI talk to. It authenticates the caller, resolves which tools their passes permit, runs guardrails over the arguments, calls the upstream MCP, runs guardrails over the result, records the call, and returns it. There are a few endpoint shapes: Disabling an MCP in the admin console removes its tools from every client immediately. A member’s own master pause switch does the same for just that person.