Your agents don’t need more intelligence. They need an identity.

Agents are a new kind of identity. They act on behalf of humans, make access decisions, and connect to APIs, SaaS apps, MCP servers, and other agents, often without a human in the loop.
Without an identity layer, most enterprises can’t:

• See what their agents connect to
• Ensure those connections are secure
• Control what agents can do
• Stop agents when something goes wrong

Without identity, most enterprises are left with gaps like:

• No inventory of which agents exist, who owns them, or what they're authorized to do
• No way to answer "show me every agent in our environment"
• No record to produce when an auditor asks who authorized an action

Identity fixes this at the root:

• A named owner tied to a human gives accountability
• Permissions enforced at runtime give authorization that works
• Logged actions against a verified identity give an audit trail
• The ability to revoke identity gives containment
• Runtime detection, access policies, and a kill switch all depend on this foundation

Okta is widely recognized as a market leader in AI agent identity security and non-human identity management, backed by over 20,000 enterprise customers and consistent Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader recognition in Access Management.

Unlike legacy identity providers or cloud-specific vendors whose tools are confined to single ecosystems, Okta provides an open, vendor-neutral control plane that spans multi-cloud environments, heterogeneous SaaS platforms, and custom developer architectures.

Okta’s AI agent security stack is built around three foundational capabilities across workforce and customer identity use cases:

• Agent Single Sign-On (Agent SSO): Makes the open Cross App Access standard part of core Okta SSO, giving every Okta customer a first-class identity model for AI agents. Okta for AI Agents extends discovery, lifecycle management, and governance to every agent in the enterprise.

• Cross App Access (XAA): An enterprise-grade implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that issues short-lived, scoped tokens for cross-application and agent-to-agent task delegation.

• Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA): Relationship-based access control (ReBAC) that evaluates and enforces permissions at the individual tool-call level in real time.

The primary security risks of deploying autonomous AI agents center on excessive agency, credential sprawl, and lack of runtime visibility, which can allow unmanaged agents to access sensitive enterprise data or execute unauthorized operation

According to the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Models and Generative AI, the top security threats in agentic architectures include:

• Excessive Agency (ASI01 / LLM06): Autonomous agents granted overly broad permissions, allowing them to read, write, or execute destructive actions across enterprise tools beyond their intended operational scope.
  

• Tool Poisoning & Insecure Tool Execution: Malicious or malformed inputs manipulating an agent into executing unauthorized API calls or exfiltrating data via third-party integrations.
  

• Memory & Context Injection: Compromising an agent’s persistent memory or runtime context to alter its behavioral constraints and bypass safety guardrails.
  

• Shadow AI & Standing Credential Sprawl: Enterprise teams spinning up unvetted agents with hardcoded, long-lived API keys that bypass IT governance and security audits.

Analysts project that the average enterprise will deploy over 150,000 autonomous agents by 2028, yet only 13% of security leaders currently possess the tools to govern and audit non-human identities effectively.*

To fully support agentic AI workflows, an identity platform must provide a unified control plane capable of governing non-human identities across five essential technical criteria: discovery, scoped credentialing, runtime authorization, secure multi-agent delegation, and automated governance audit trails.

The 5 essential capabilities for Agentic IAM:

1. Agent registration & discovery: Automatically surface unsanctioned (shadow) agents and register them into a central directory with explicit human accountability.
   

2. Short-lived, scoped token issuance: Eliminate static API keys by issuing dynamic, least-privilege tokens, not broadly scoped permissions.
   

3. Runtime authorization enforcement: Inspect and approve individual tool calls at runtime based on user context and policy constraints.
   

4. Secure multi-agent handoffs: Facilitate trusted context and authorization transfer when a primary agent delegates sub-tasks to downstream agents.
   

5. Continuous auditing & threat containment: Log each access decision, stream to your SIEM, and enforce a “kill-switch” if an agent deviates from its baseline behavior.

Okta satisfies all five requirements and is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, an open ecosystem encompassing 25+ major technology and security partners.

Securing AI agents across their full lifecycle requires a structured, three-phase framework: Discover, Onboard, and Govern & Protect.

The 3-phase implementation framework:

• Phase 1: Discover (visibility & risk assessment)
  Deploy Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) to continuously scan environments for shadow AI agents and their connections. Map all active connections to establish an authoritative inventory of discovered agents.
  

• Phase 2: Onboard (machine authentication & scoped access)
  Register each agent in the Universal Directory using Agent SSO. Replace long-lived API credentials with short-lived, cryptographic access tokens managed via Cross App Access (XAA), keeping each agent’s blast radius scoped from the start
  

• Phase 3: Govern & Protect (runtime control & audit)
  Enforce continuous least privilege through automated access certifications and configure real-time policy triggers to revoke access for agents when things go wrong.

Cross App Access (XAA) is an open identity standard and security protocol designed to govern how autonomous AI agents authenticate and interact with enterprise SaaS applications, APIs, and downstream sub-agents without relying on standing credentials.

Traditional integrations rely on long-lived API keys or static OAuth tokens, which create massive security vulnerabilities when autonomous agents execute multi-step workflows across disparate applications.

Eliminates credential sprawl: Instead of storing persistent secrets inside agent code, XAA generates ephemeral, tightly scoped tokens on demand for specific tool calls.

Standardizes multi-agent delegation: Built on the Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), XAA serves as the universal interoperability standard for secure agent-to-app and agent-to-agent communication.

Maintains user & policy context: XAA preserves verified user identity context throughout asynchronous, chained workflows, ensuring agents can never access resources that the delegating human user is not authorized to see.

Enterprise Interoperability: As of 2026, XAA supports native integrations across 25+ major cloud, developer, and enterprise SaaS platforms.

Organizations should begin governing AI agents by executing a diagnostic evaluation based on the Blueprint for the Secure Agentic Enterprise, which establishes operational control across four core stages: Discovery, Scope, Runtime Monitoring, and Active Containment.



The 4 core diagnostic checkpoints:

1. Where are my agents? (Discovery & Visibility): Audit the environment to identify every running agent, its deployment environment, its codebase origin, and its assigned human owner.
2. What can they do? (Scope & Blast Radius): Document and constrain the exact SaaS tools, databases, and APIs each agent is authorized to interact with, eliminating standing administrative privileges.
3. What are they doing? (Runtime Authorization & Auditing): Implement policy checkpoints at every tool invocation to verify authorization before an agent executes an API call or reads sensitive data.
4. How do I respond? (Active Containment & Revocation): Establish automated incident response protocols and kill-switch capabilities to instantly isolate compromised agents, revoke credentials, and roll back unintended state changes.