WorkOS vs Dust
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
WorkOS keeps shipping fine-grained identity primitives — for both humans and agents.
The cadence is steady and surgical: small, well-scoped releases across auth (user-scoped API keys, change-email API), authorization (FGA custom roles scoped to resource types, Groups API), admin operability (IT contacts, dashboard metadata editing), and directory enrichment. The recent MCP Auth resource-indicator support and a Node SDK feature-flags runtime client show the platform leaning toward agent/AI use cases and into developer tooling.
WorkOS is widening the identity surface in two directions at once. For humans, it's filling in long-tail B2B IAM gaps — granular API key scoping, self-serve email change, group-level org memberships, custom roles per resource. For agents, it's quietly building MCP Auth as a first-class control point. The two threads will meet at the application authorization layer, where the same FGA model can decide what a user or an agent is allowed to do.
Expect more MCP Auth surface area (token binding, scoped scopes, audit) and continued FGA depth — likely policy-language ergonomics or relationship-based filtering. Feature flags will likely gain server-side targeting and richer SDK coverage beyond Node.
Dust is widening the agent-platform surface: multimodal tools, enterprise audit, model breadth.
Dust is shipping at a fast clip on three fronts that together define a serious agent platform: model breadth (Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3, refreshed Anthropic lineup), agent capability (MCP tools can now return images the agent can actually see, plus context compaction for long runs), and enterprise readiness (workspace audit logs streamable to Datadog, Splunk, or any HTTPS sink). Integrations are getting versioned upgrades on the side (Asana MCP v2, Gmail labels and archive). The product is moving from 'chat with an agent' toward 'run agents in production with observability and multimodal I/O.'
Two clear directions: deeper enterprise GTM via SIEM-grade audit, and a more capable agent runtime that can see, remember, and act inside third-party SaaS. The MCP-image release in particular treats Model Context Protocol as a real I/O surface rather than a text-only RPC, which is where the broader MCP ecosystem is heading. Frequent model rotations suggest Dust is positioning as model-agnostic infrastructure rather than locking into one provider.
Next moves likely lean into the same arc: more MCP integrations with action verbs (write/delete/transition states), expanded multimodal returns (audio, structured documents), and finer-grained admin controls layered on top of the audit foundation - tool-usage policies, per-agent egress rules, or approval workflows.
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