AI Agents Force a Rethink of Identity and Access
Autonomous AI agents have moved from experiments to everyday infrastructure, and security teams are scrambling to keep up. Research cited by SailPoint shows that 85% of organizations are already running AI agents in production, while many cannot reliably distinguish between human and agent activity. At the same time, Palo Alto Networks reports that identity now spans employees, service accounts, scripts, and increasingly autonomous software agents. Traditional identity access management was never designed for ephemeral, delegated, multi-agent workflows, where one AI spins up another to complete a task and then disappears. That creates a growing AI agent security problem: shared API keys, inherited credentials, and always-on permissions give agents far more power than their tasks require. The industry response is to treat agents as first-class identities, bringing them into enterprise IAM solutions with the same rigor as human users.
Keycard Pushes Scoped, Session-Based Access for Multi-Agent Apps
Keycard is targeting the core structural weakness in most agentic architectures: overly broad, persistent credentials. Its new Keycard for Multi-Agent Apps product lets developers assign every AI agent a unique identity, then grant only the scoped, session-based access required for a specific task. Instead of relying on shared keys or static credentials, access is delegated between agents per task and automatically revoked when the session ends. Every action is attributable, tying activity back to the initiating agent, user, and system. Customers like Chime report being able to deploy agents into production without turning engineers into identity experts, highlighting how autonomous AI control can be embedded directly into development workflows. By eliminating standing privileges, Keycard aims to reduce the chance that a runaway or compromised agent can delete critical resources or exfiltrate confidential data without detection.
Palo Alto Networks Idira Unifies Human and Non-Human Identities
Palo Alto Networks’ Idira platform is designed as an AI identity-security control layer that unifies human and non-human identities. Idira sits at the center of the vendor’s model for employees, service accounts, and autonomous agents, enforcing consistent identity access management policies across them all. It taps CyberArk for privileged-access management, so both users and agents can receive elevated permissions only when needed and have them revoked once a task completes. Koi provides visibility into unconventional AI-related assets such as plugins, scripts, and endpoint artifacts, while Portkey extends control into AI agent governance and routing. With Palo Alto’s survey indicating that 91% of organizations already operate autonomous agents in production, Idira focuses on reducing the risk of slow privilege changes and weak revocation. The goal is to give security teams a single plane to monitor what each identity—human or agent—is allowed to do at any moment.
SailPoint Brings AI Agents into Enterprise Identity Governance
SailPoint’s Agentic Fabric adds a governance layer for AI agents and other non-human identities inside its Identity Security Cloud. Where traditional IAM stops at basic authentication and authorization, Agentic Fabric discovers AI agents, maps them to responsible human owners, and applies identity governance policies such as least privilege and real-time authorization. SailPoint also offers a Discovery Tool trial to help organizations surface shadow AI and unsanctioned applications already operating in their environments. Industry guidance from the Cloud Security Alliance, cited by SailPoint, stresses that agentic AI introduces autonomy, ephemerality, and delegation patterns that conventional IAM cannot handle effectively. By treating agents as governed identities—alongside employees, contractors, and machine accounts—SailPoint aims to ensure that every agent’s access is intentional, auditable, and revocable, rather than a blind spot in the identity landscape.
From Coding Assistants to Production Workers: What Comes Next
As AI coding assistants and task bots infiltrate development and operations, cloud security and IAM teams are converging on a shared goal: make every AI action traceable, scoped, and controllable. Tools like Keycard embed fine-grained, per-task access into multi-agent applications, while platforms like Idira and Agentic Fabric bring AI agent security into the same policy and governance frameworks used for people. This evolution supports safer integration of AI into software pipelines, where agents may provision infrastructure, modify code, or manipulate sensitive data. Identity access management is becoming the backbone of AI identity governance, mapping each autonomous agent to its owner, data entitlements, and allowed operations. The trajectory is clear: enterprises will increasingly demand the ability to onboard, monitor, and decommission AI agents just as they do employees—only at machine speed and scale.