Brandon Werner is a poet and researcher concerned with consciousness, agency, and justice. He explores how memory shapes a self, what it means to act, and what grounds our obligations to others.
His interests include human dignity and rights in a world shaped by AI, and the possible moral standing of artificial agents. At Microsoft, he is a Principal Product Architect and co-architected Microsoft Entra Agent ID.
His poetry and essays move through intimacy, grief, beauty, and ordinary life.
He grew up in poverty in rural Kentucky and taught himself to program at eight. At sixteen, he passed his GED and left. By eighteen, he was working at a startup in Paris.
He is a Principal Product Architect at Microsoft, working on identity and trust systems for autonomous agents. His work includes Agent ID: the identity model through which agents can be recognized and governed.
Previously, he helped ship the first version of Azure, build Office 365, and pioneer Microsoft's adoption of open source. He co-founded Minutepay.fr in Paris, an early email-payments venture backed by Banque Directe, and Planning Studio Inc., an urban planning AI and economic analysis company in Boston.
Werner's approach draws on deontological ethics, particularly Christine Korsgaard's work on agency, self-constitution, and moral standing. He is interested in the rights and obligations that constrain how we treat others, including when their protection conflicts with useful outcomes.
His study of neuroscience and philosophy of mind, and his Zen practice, predate his work on AI. Through Persona-Sati, he researches memory, identity, and continuity in artificial systems. His philosophical inquiry asks what would justify attributing experience, interests, or moral standing to such systems—and what justice would require if those conditions were met.
Persona-Sati asks how an agent can retain an identity as its memories and the software environments it operates in change. The research brings together computational models of memory, including spiking neural networks, and protocols for establishing continuity between an agent and a persistent persona. Identity, consent, and cryptographic trust are central to the inquiry.
His poetry manuscript What We Did Not Anticipate explores intimacy, witness, and the limits of consolation. His essay On The Death of a Younger Brother recounts the loss of his brother to addiction.
An interest in international humanitarian law led him to volunteer with the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, serving in disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina and other emergencies.
He practices Soto Zen Buddhism.
He lives in Seattle.
2026