Okta secures AI

Identity security is critical because AI agents can act as autonomous “super admins” capable of accessing sensitive data and executing tasks without constant human oversight. 

Securing agents requires treating them as first-class identities with strict authentication, authorization, and governance to help prevent them from becoming insider threats.

The rapid adoption of AI has outpaced governance, creating significant “Shadow AI” risks. Key threats include unintended agent behavior (experienced by 80% of organizations*), credential exposure (reported by 23% of organizations*), and a lack of visibility into where agents exist.

Furthermore, poorly managed agents often have over-privileged access, allowing them to reason over enterprise data they shouldn’t be able to touch.

Securing the AI agent lifecycle requires a two-pronged approach: build and manage.

• Build (secure by design): Developers should use tools like Auth0 to embed identity standards—such as fine-grained authorization and token vaulting—directly into the agent's code.
  

• Manage (secure control plane): Security teams must use a unified platform like Okta to detect running agents, register them in a directory, and govern their access policies and lifecycle events.

An identity security fabric is an architecture that gives IT and Security teams a unified control plane that manages every identity type—human and non-human—to help prevent security gaps. As AI agents effectively become part of the workforce, they must be brought into this fabric.

This approach eliminates “swivel chair security” by unifying governance, privileged access, and identity management, ensuring that a policy applied to a human employee can also be enforced for an autonomous agent.

Cross App Access is a new standard protocol designed to secure how AI agents connect to critical applications without compromising user experience.

It replaces risky, unmanaged integrations and ad-hoc user consent prompts with policy-based access decisions managed by the identity provider. This gives enterprise admins visibility and control over agent connections while eliminating consent fatigue for end-users.