If you're a CISO, you're likely hearing some version of this from your board: "What's our AI security strategy?"
And you're probably giving some version of this answer: "We're working on it. The AI policy is still being defined. Once we know what we're deploying, we'll secure it."
That answer felt safe six months ago. It doesn't anymore.
The AI agents you're planning to deploy aren't the ones currently putting you at risk. The ones already running in your environment are.
Executive summary
- The AI governance gap: Okta’s 2025 AI at Work report found that while 91% of organizations deploy AI agents, only 10% have a management strategy, leaving over-privileged agents as an immediate risk.
- The visibility blind spot: Traditional network and endpoint tools can’t track the specific actions, owners, and permissions of compromised AI agents.
- Identity as the control plane: Identity is the only security layer capable of answering which agent did what, on whose behalf, and whether it was allowed.
- A unified approach: Okta for AI Agents lets you discover, onboard, protect, and govern your AI agents.
The enterprise shift toward agentic AI is no longer a future state—it’s a production reality. Okta’s 2025 AI at Work report found that today, 91% of organizations are already using AI agents to automate complex workflows and drive productivity. However, the same report highlights a dangerous governance gap: While deployment is surging, only 10% of leaders report having a well-developed strategy or roadmap for managing non-human identities, including AI agents.
The shadow AI risk: Managing the invisible workforce
The impulse to delay identity evaluation ignores a foundational truth: The risk isn't just the AI you will deploy tomorrow; it's the over-privileged agents already running today.
Forget fully defining your AI policy for a moment. Try answering these questions about your environment today:
- Where are my AI agents?
- What can they connect to?
- What can they do?
Most security leaders can't answer any of these questions with confidence, and that's not a failure of your security program. It's a structural gap. The agents are already here, and your existing identity controls likely don't extend to them yet.
While formal rollouts are debated, employees are frequently connecting third-party AI tools to corporate accounts via OAuth grants, such as Cursor to GitHub, Claude to Google Workspace, and AI meeting notetakers to calendars, at a pace that governance can’t keep up with.
Every grant creates a non-human identity with delegated rights into enterprise data, often without a verified owner or a clear "blast radius."
The reality of shadow AI
A recent incident at a well-known developer platform involved no vulnerability or infrastructure flaw, just an OAuth connection between an employee's corporate account and a third-party AI tool, granted entirely outside IT's line of sight. When that AI tool was compromised, the pre-granted trust became the attack path: A straight line into internal systems, API keys, tokens, and environment variables. This is what shadow AI actually looks like in practice–an unsanctioned OAuth grant nobody approved and without IT oversight.
The uncomfortable truth: if you wait to secure your AI agents until your AI policy is finalized, you'll be applying governance on top of risk that's already compounded.
Find your AI security gaps with our 5-minute attack simulator.
Why identity is the essential layer for AI governance
Traditional security models often prioritize network or endpoint protection. While these are vital layers, they are fundamentally blind to which autonomous agents are accessing what and why.
- Network tools see traffic; an AI agent acting on a user’s behalf looks like legitimate API traffic.
- Endpoint tools see processes; an AI agent looks like a standard authorized process running under a legitimate user's session.
Both layers are essential, but neither can answer the questions that matter when an incident occurs: “Which agent did this, on whose behalf, with what scope, and was it allowed?”
In the agentic era, identity is the only security layer that understands intent and scope. This is why 85% of leaders now rank identity and access management (IAM) as the most critical component of their AI strategy (Okta, AI at Work Report 2025).
The developer platform incident we described earlier helps illustrate the point: It wasn't an endpoint or network failure. Based on our understanding, this was an identity failure, specifically: How third-party apps and AI tools are granted access, what they can do, and for how long.
That's why we built Okta for AI Agents, a purpose-built solution that extends the Okta Platform to discover, onboard, protect, and govern your AI agents in your environment. Okta for AI Agents discovers and onboards AI agents across any platform, protects connections with scoped least-privilege access, and governs them with access reviews, complete audit trails, and the ability to manually deactivate an AI agent instantly with a kill switch to prevent new tokens requests and future authorizations when an agent behaves unexpectedly.
Four essential capabilities for full agent visibility and control
When identity is the control plane for agents, four things become possible in a unified way:
- First-class agent identity: Your agents, whether built in-house, embedded in a SaaS tool, or running on an employee's laptop–are registered as workload principals with credentials, an assigned human owner, and a managed lifecycle. This is what you can tell your CIO when they ask: “Who owns this agent, and who is accountable if it goes wrong?"
- Cryptographic attribution: Every action carries both the human and the agent identity, cryptographically signed. This is what you can show your auditor when they ask: "Which agent did this, and on whose behalf?"
- Least privilege enforcement: Tokens are scoped to a single call, not a session or an app. Standing privilege disappears. This is what you can tell your board when they ask: "What's our exposure if one of these agents gets compromised?"
- Integrated governance: Agent access requests and access certifications are built into the identity platform, not bolted on. This is what you can show your auditor when they ask: "Show your AI agent's access was reviewed by a human in the last 90 days.”
But capabilities only matter if they apply everywhere your agents run, which means agent strategy has to be ecosystem-anchored. Your agents may be running across Salesforce Agentforce, Amazon Bedrock, ServiceNow AI, and whatever platform your teams adopt next. Every time an agent crosses an ecosystem, the governance from the platform on which it was built stays behind. What's left is the gap.
That's the gap Okta was built to close. Okta for AI Agents is vendor-neutral by design, abstracting identity brokering across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud so the same policies apply uniformly everywhere—without one-off integrations.
Designed to extend your IdP, not replace it
A primary concern for IT architects is "identity sprawl"—the fear of adding a second identity silo for AI. Modern AI governance shouldn’t require a "rip and replace" of your existing workforce identity.
Your identity provider (IdP) is the system of record for your workforce. It's where your sign-in policies live, where multifactor authentication is enforced, where conditional access is tuned, and where years of integration work have made human identity governance run smoothly. None of that should change because you're adding agents to the picture.
Okta for AI Agents is additive by design. It federates with your existing IdP via standard protocols (OIDC, SAML), inheriting trust from your IdP without duplicating credentials or requiring a second sign-in. When a human invokes an agent, Okta validates the identity assertion from your IdP and issues a cryptographically signed token carrying both the human and the agent. Humans stay where they are. Agents get governance built for them.
The result: You extend the identity foundation you've already invested in to cover a new class of identity, without re-platforming, duplicating directories, or adding operational drag.
Read more about Okta’s approach to providing a vendor-neutral layer that secures every connection without requiring you to replace your current IdP.
Start here: Three questions to answer today
Your AI policy can wait, but the agents in your environment can't.
Start with three questions:
Where are my AI agents?
What can they connect to?
What can they do?
Identity is the only layer that can answer all three questions and is the foundation on which your future policy will stand.
Experience AI governance firsthand. Try the interactive Okta for AI Agents demo.
Frequently asked questions
How do employees introduce shadow AI into an enterprise network?
Employees typically introduce shadow AI by granting third-party AI tools direct API access to corporate environments using OAuth permissions. These integrations, such as connecting an AI assistant to a corporate calendar or code repository, occur seamlessly at the user level, bypassing traditional IT oversight and creating unmonitored non-human identities.
Why are network and endpoint security tools blind to AI agent actions?
Traditional network tools view autonomous AI agent activity as legitimate API traffic, while endpoint tools interpret it as standard processes running inside an authorized user session. Because these perimeters lack application-level identity context, they can’t determine which specific agent initiated an action, on whose behalf it acted, or what its blast radius is.
Can you secure AI agents before finalizing a formal corporate AI policy?
Yes. Waiting for a formal corporate governance policy leaves active security vulnerabilities unaddressed. Security teams can mitigate risk by extending their existing IdP architecture to discover, authorize, and govern autonomous workloads through non-human identity protocols rather than waiting for structural policy approval.
Does implementing AI agent security require a completely separate identity directory?
No. Effective AI governance should avoid "identity sprawl" through additive integration with your primary IdP. Using open federation standards like OpenID Connect (OIDC) and SAML, platforms like Okta can issue scoped tokens that map machine agent identities back to existing human authentication rules without duplicating user credentials.
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.
These materials are for general informational purposes only and do not constitute legal, privacy, security, compliance, or business advice.
The content may not reflect the most current security, legal and/or privacy developments. You are solely responsible for obtaining advice from your own legal and/or professional advisor and should not rely on these materials.
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