Brandon Werner is a writer, technologist, and published poet. His work is concerned with identity, agency, and dignity: how systems establish trust, and what their decisions mean for the people who live with them.
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.
Alongside his work at Microsoft, Werner is developing Persona-Sati, a research program on memory and continuity in machine systems. It 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. His interests in neuroscience and philosophy of mind inform his study of memory and consciousness.
He lives in Seattle.
2026