Tailscale ships tailcat, an account-free encrypted pipe whose stated strongest use case is AI agent access

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Announced at TailscaleUp 2026 and pushed through 2026-08-29, tailcat is a control-plane-free network pipe reusing Tailscale's data plane: userspace WireGuard for encryption, magicsock for STUN discovery and UDP hole punching, and gVisor netstack to terminate TCP in-process, so it needs no TUN device, no routes and no root. One side runs a server and gets a short token; the other connects with it, with no Tailscale account or login flow. It can pipe stdin/stdout, expose local ports or run an auth-free SSH server, and coverage identifies ephemeral connectivity for agents that cannot navigate login flows as the leading use. The repo is BSD-3-Clause and gained roughly 790 stars in a day against 3,068 total.