Agent identity guides
In short:Six practical guides for teams putting AI agents under identity control. They cover agent identities, owners and sponsors, short-lived credentials and delegation. Two more give twenty vendor questions and explain running a layer alongside Okta or Entra. Each guide links to the platforms and terms it mentions.
How to give an AI agent its own identity
Give each agent a registered identity, a named owner and credentials that expire. Stop agents borrowing a person's token or a shared API key. Then check what the agent does at run time, not only when it signs in. The order matters: inventory, ownership, credentials, then runtime control.
Agent owners and sponsors: who answers for an AI agent
Every agent needs a named person who answers for it. Microsoft calls that person a sponsor; most other platforms say owner. The owner approves access, receives reviews and is the contact in an incident. Without one, an agent is unmanaged however good its credentials are.
Short-lived credentials for agents
Agents should not hold keys that last for months. Give them credentials that expire within minutes or hours and cover one task. Better still, keep the tool's credential out of the agent entirely by using a gateway or broker. A leaked token then has almost no value.
On-behalf-of delegation explained
On-behalf-of delegation means an agent acting for a person stays within that person's permissions. Each request carries both identities, so systems know who acted and for whom. When agents call other agents, the chain must stay intact. Lose it and actions appear to come from nobody.
Choosing an agent identity platform: 20 questions
Use these twenty questions to compare agent identity platforms on ownership, credentials, delegation, runtime control, discovery, standards and buying clarity. Ask each vendor to answer in a live demo against your own systems. Written answers are easy to polish, while demos show what the product really does.
Running an agent identity layer alongside Okta or Entra
Keep Okta or Entra for employee sign-in. Add an agent identity layer for what sign-in does not cover. That means discovery of unregistered agents, checks on every tool call and approval of risky actions. An agent identity layer runs alongside your identity provider, never instead of it.
Also see the glossary and the evaluation checklist.