Secure and govern your AI agents

AI security involves protecting AI systems themselves from attacks, ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the AI models and the data they process. It addresses threats like data poisoning, model evasion, and the misuse of AI for malicious purposes.

As AI agents are given more responsibility, they become attractive targets for attackers. Security flaws can be exploited to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems, leading to data breaches, compliance violations, and a loss of customer trust. Because AI agents can operate autonomously, any security failure can scale quickly.

Key threats include prompt injections to manipulate outputs, persona switching to gain unauthorized access, and exploiting misconfigured or over-privileged identities to access sensitive data. AI agents can also be tricked into revealing access credentials or performing unintended actions.

The main challenge is that traditional security approaches were built for human identities, not autonomous systems. AI agents have short lifespans, use non-human authentication methods like API tokens and cryptographic certificates, and lack the clear accountability of a human user. This creates a governance gap or “identity blind spot” that organizations struggle to close.

The first step is to establish a comprehensive, identity-first approach that governs both the humans using AI and the AI agents themselves. 

For users, this starts with securing access to AI applications through SSO and creating clear procedures for requesting and approving access. 

For the agents, it means treating each one as a distinct non-human identity, ensuring every autonomous action they take can be governed, monitored, and secured from the start.

Okta helps you secure AI agents by treating them as first-class, non-human identities (NHIs) within our identity security fabric. We extend our proven identity security principles to AI agents, bringing them into a single control plane for comprehensive visibility, control, and governance, just like human identities.

The role of privacy is to provide the visibility, control, and governance necessary to prevent unauthorized data access by AI. A rogue agent can access and share data outside of your awareness, creating a significant blind spot. Okta’s solution provides the guardrails and protocols to govern these agents, ensuring they only access the data they are authorized to, thereby protecting user and company privacy.

A “human in the loop” is crucial for oversight and should be implemented in two key scenarios: user access requests and agent action approvals.

Okta enables this through capabilities like Async Authorization, which allows an autonomous agent to work independently but requires explicit user approval before executing sensitive tasks, ensuring both efficiency and control.