As organizations race to deploy AI agents, they hit a significant wall: traditional identity providers (IdPs) were designed around human users with predictable patterns and manageable scale. Agents break every one of those assumptions. They operate at machine velocity, spawn other agents, and access systems across multi-cloud environments with little oversight.
To top it off, agents don't live in one place. They're running in Microsoft 365 Copilot, built in Salesforce Agentforce, deployed from Amazon Bedrock, embedded in SaaS tools, and written as custom code that your engineers shipped in their last sprint. Each one has a sliver of governance from the platform it runs on. None of them covers your entire footprint. The result is that most organizations can't answer three key questions:
- Where are my agents?
- What can they connect to?
- What can they do?
The answer to these questions can’t be a patchwork of point solutions that each cover only one piece of the problem, or platform-native tools that play nice only within their own ecosystem and create vendor lock-in. The solution has to be capable of governing the full agent lifecycle and supporting every platform your agents run on–without disrupting the identity infrastructure you've already built.
Okta for AI Agents is designed to bridge the gap between your existing infrastructure and the AI-driven infrastructure of the future. It follows a simple, powerful vision: any agent, any resource, any IdP. Whether you’re building custom agents or deploying SaaS-embedded ones, Okta aims to provide a vendor-neutral governance layer that secures every connection without requiring you to replace your current IdP.
Any agent: Every agent becomes a first-class identity
Your agent footprint may be larger and more varied than you think. Okta for AI Agents discovers and governs agents across your enterprise, making them first-class identities with clear human ownership and enforcement policies.
That starts with uncovering the agents you don't know about: shadow AI. These agents are invisible to your security and IT teams and operate in enterprise environments without oversight. You need to discover them, so you can govern them before they become a risk.
Known agents come in many forms, and each one demands its own path to governance. Homegrown agents built with custom code or on agent-builder platforms can be brought under governance in minutes with Okta's prebuilt integrations. Then there are the agents embedded in your SaaS tools and those that run on user endpoints via tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. You can onboard these agents securely and unlock their full potential, while future-proofing your investments so you're not locked into a single vendor.
Wherever an agent lives, however it was built, you can bring it under governance with Okta.
Any resource: Enforce security policies on every connection
Once you know where your agents are, you need to map everything they can reach and enforce policies on every connection. Okta for AI Agents replaces hardcoded credentials and standing access with scoped, short-lived tokens issued only for what the agent needs, only for as long as it needs them. And because there's no ecosystem lock, agents can connect to resources–such as authorization servers, secrets, service accounts, applications, and MCP servers–regardless of where they were built.
This capability lets you enforce least privilege for AI agents in real time, without slowing adoption. Learn how Okta enforces zero standing privilege for AI agents.
Any IdP: Keep your existing stack. Add agent governance.
Whether your humans sign in through Entra ID, Ping, or another IdP, those solutions keep doing their jobs. Your sign-in can stay the same. Your policies for humans can stay the same.
You’ve invested in mature identity infrastructure, tuned your policies, trained your teams, and integrated your chosen IdP across your technology stack. Your existing provider is doing what it was built to do: secure human access to enterprise resources. Now, you need a dedicated solution to manage the unique behaviors and risks of AI agents.
Okta for AI Agents federates with any IdP via standard protocols such as OIDC and SAML and extends AI agent governance across your existing infrastructure, creating a unified solution in which your IdP and Okta work in tandem to secure human and agent identities. Here’s how it works:
- Maintain your human system of record (your existing IdP): Your users continue to sign in through your current IdP with their credentials, MFA, and existing policies. This remains your system of record for humans.
- Establish trust transfer (Okta for AI Agents): When a user interacts with an AI agent, Okta validates the identity assertion from your IdP– no second sign-in or credential duplication. Okta accepts that your IdP has authenticated the user and builds agent governance on top of that trust.
- Govern the lifecycle of agents (Okta for AI Agents): Okta establishes an agent identity on top of a trusted human identity, controlling what the agent can do and access.
The result: Your organization maintains its current IdP investment while gaining a dedicated control plane for agents that understands agent behavior, permissions, and risk.
Ready to secure your AI agents?
Most solutions cover one piece of the agent identity problem. Okta covers all of it, across the full agent lifecycle:
- Discover known and unknown AI agents across your enterprise environment.
- Onboard agents into a unified control plane as first-class identities with clear human ownership.
- Protect agent connections with short-lived credentials and least-privilege policies.
- Govern agent lifecycles and access with reviews, audit trails, and agent deactivation if one goes rogue.
Okta for AI Agents is your identity control plane for AI agents. It works seamlessly with your existing infrastructure, secures the agents you’re already running, and scales alongside the agents you'll deploy next.
Okta for AI Agents is now generally available. See how it helps you discover, onboard, protect, and govern agents across your environment while working seamlessly with your existing IdP.
Already on Okta? Start governing your AI agents. Talk to your Okta team
Using another IdP? Okta can serve as your agent IdP as part of your identity security fabric. Explore the demo
Any mention of future products, features, functionalities, or certifications in this blog is for informational purposes only. These items are not commitments to deliver and should not be relied upon to make purchasing decisions.
