Corporate/enterprise networks have nightmarish setups for centralizing access to LLMs. This seems like an extremely natural direction for Tailscale; it is to LLM interfaces what Tailscale itself was to VPNs, a drastically simplified system that, by making policy legible, actually allows security teams to do the access control that was mostly aspirational under the status quo ante.

Seems straightforward?

I think if you don't have friends working at e.g. big banks or whatever, you might not grok just how nutty it is to try to run simple agent workflows.

Another reason they could have built this was by listening to their users. I do believe lots of people are spinning up agents in their workplaces, and managing yet another set of api keys is probably annoying for Tailscale's customers. This feels like a great solution to me.

I realised I wasn't Tailscale's target customer when I reported a 100% reproducible iOS bug/regression over a year ago. It was confirmed, logged, and forgotten.

There's actually a mass acquisition game going on right now in this space. Companies want to use genAI, but don't necessarily want to hire people to run their own models in-house. It may not be obvious to startup-y employees, but keeping data in-house is huge for big companies. LLM traffic is a lot different from established traffic that firewalls have been built up for. You can't block data leaks as easily as shutting down access to google drive. When you can't trust all of your employees, genAI presents a lot of new attack vectors.

In times of peace, the hardest part of running a military is keeping the troops busy.

This seems quite useful to me, especially for a larger org. If your dev's are working on LLM features, they'll need access to the OpenAI APIs. So are you just gonna give all of them a key? the same key?

No idea how this is solved at the moment, so seems like a smart step

A huge chunk of the open issues are feature requests with many of those already being implemented years ago but not yet marked closed. And a vast majority of the bugs are repeats, they clearly need someone to clean up their issue tracker.

Came to say this. It looks like a Mozilla move.

+1

I like tailscale itself but a lot of basic stuff (such as dynamic routing) or ephemeral node auth are very lacking, wish they would concentrate more on their core product we all like and want to see improve

> my company has been tracking some particular issues for years without progress

Sounds like something your Account Manager or similar would need to work through. Development roadmaps are often driven by the largest, or loudest customers.