Agent identity

When a human logs into a system, identity is straightforward: one person, one session, one set of permissions. When an AI agent acts on a user's behalf, the picture gets complicated fast. The agent may call dozens of APIs in a single session, spawn subagents, delegate tasks to other agents, and access systems the original user could reach. Legacy identity and access management (IAM) systems were designed for humans and static service accounts, neither of which maps cleanly onto an agent that reasons, delegates, and moves across systems dynamically.

Agent identity as a formal concept means treating each agent as a first-class identity object with its own credentials (often short-lived tokens rather than permanent API keys), its own access scope, and a delegation chain that records the full lineage: this agent, acting for this user, with this permission set, at this time. NIST's National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence published a concept paper on agent identity and authorization in February 2026, and by RSAC 2026 multiple major vendors had shipped dedicated products in the category.

For builders deploying agentic systems, agent identity is where security and product design intersect. Giving an agent overly broad permissions is easy and dangerous; scoping it tightly requires intentional design upfront. Key questions include: does your agent have its own credentials or is it borrowing the user's? Are those credentials short-lived and scoped to the task? Is there an audit trail that lets you reconstruct exactly what the agent did and why? These aren't compliance checkboxes; they become operational necessities as agents start touching production systems, customer data, and external APIs.