AI agents need their own identifiable principals, narrowly scoped authority, and a clear link to the person or system that authorized their work. Conventional identity and access management (IAM) still supplies useful foundations, but governance designed mainly around people and services may not show who delegated an agent’s authority, what task it was meant to perform, or whether its access should change when the task or context changes.
NIST is exploring standards-based ways to identify, manage, and authorize software agents; it has not presented a finished, universal agent-governance framework. That makes the practical priority clear: establish accountability and control around each agent now, without assuming that a new protocol or product will solve the whole problem.
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Why conventional identity governance has a gap
Identity systems answer foundational questions: which principal is making a request, and what is that principal allowed to do? Agents make those questions harder because software can act autonomously, call tools, and continue with limited human supervision. A human user may initiate a task, but the agent may perform many of its steps.
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If an agent uses a person’s credentials, logs can make its actions look like the person’s. That obscures attribution and weakens accountability. NIST authors Bill Fisher and Ryan Galluzzo describe credential sharing as violating IAM’s accountability principle: “enabling accountability by verifying both the identity and permissions of the individual or service attempting to complete a transaction.” Their August 27, 2026 NIST article argues for a strong identity foundation for agentic AI.
The answer is not to discard IAM. It is to make the agent visible as a distinct actor while preserving the connection to the user or system that authorized it. NIST’s current work treats agent identity and authorization as an emerging implementation challenge, not a settled replacement for existing identity standards.
What an agent identity must establish
A distinct principal
Give each agent, or each appropriately bounded deployment of an agent, an identity that systems can distinguish from both its operator and other agents. Do not have an agent simply inherit a person’s login. A distinct identity makes it possible to identify the agent in access decisions and activity records.
An accountable sponsor and initiator
Record who or what is responsible for the agent and which user or system initiated a particular task. NIST’s August 2026 analysis recommends associating agent identifiers, credentials, and entitlements with the identity of the user or system operating the agent. That relationship matters: an agent identity by itself does not explain who authorized its work.
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Credentials with a lifecycle
Know how the agent receives credentials, what they permit, and how they can be rotated, disabled, or revoked. Static API keys and long-lived bearer tokens can become standing access if nobody reviews or removes them. Time-limited credentials can reduce that exposure where the system supports them, but short duration does not replace narrowly scoped permissions or a revocation path.
Identity is not the same as authority
Authentication establishes which principal is making a request. Authorization determines what it may do. An agent can have a distinct, well-audited identity and still be dangerous if that identity has broad, persistent access.
Scope access to the task and resource
Grant the smallest set of actions and data access needed for the agent’s purpose. Consider the specific resource and operation, not just a broad role such as “editor” or “administrator.” NIST cautions that adopting modern authorization mechanisms does not automatically deliver least privilege; broad role grants, standing permissions, and entitlement creep remain problems.
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Represent delegation explicitly
For an “on behalf of” task, the system should be able to establish who delegated authority, which agent received it, what task it covers, and what constraints apply. Authority should not silently become a general-purpose extension of the user’s privileges. Where feasible, limit the delegated permission by resource, action, purpose, and duration.
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An agent’s permitted actions may need to change when its task, owner, tools, environment, or data access changes. NIST’s February 5, 2026 concept paper raises questions about updating authorization policies dynamically and defining least privilege when an agent’s required actions may not be fully predictable at deployment. These are design questions, not evidence of a single established implementation pattern.
Where agent identity approaches fit—and where they do not
NIST’s August 27, 2026 analysis identifies existing patterns such as SPIFFE and OAuth 2.0 as relevant to enterprise agent use cases, and points to emerging work including WIMSE and the Identity Assertion JWT Authorization Grant. These mechanisms may help with identity or authorization in particular architectures; the source does not identify one as a complete governance solution.
A protocol cannot, on its own, ensure that permissions are appropriately narrow, delegated authority is understandable, logs are verifiable, high-impact actions receive suitable review, or access is removed when no longer needed. Nor does identity control prevent prompt injection. NIST’s concept paper raises prompt-injection mitigation, including what to do after an injection occurs, as an open implementation question. Constrained permissions and monitoring can limit potential impact, but they should not be described as preventing the attack.
NIST’s NCCoE project page says the center is exploring standards-based approaches to identify, manage, and authorize access and actions taken by software agents, including AI agents. In a September 29, 2026 update, NIST said its first implementation use case would demonstrate agent identification, authentication, and authorization in the software development lifecycle. That is project status reported on that date, not a published final framework.
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- Credential sharing: An agent acts with a person’s credentials, making it difficult to distinguish the human’s actions from the agent’s and to establish accountability.
- Overly broad or persistent grants: An agent keeps access beyond the task or can reach more systems and data than it needs. Static keys, bearer tokens, broad roles, and accumulated entitlements can all contribute.
- Invisible delegation: Records show what the agent did but not who authorized the work, for what task, or under what limits.
- Insufficiently useful logs: Events cannot be reliably tied to the agent, initiating user or system, delegated authority, and relevant action. NIST’s concept paper asks how agent logs can be made tamper-proof and verifiable; it does not establish a universally agreed solution.
- Uncontrolled high-impact actions: The agent can send, delete, purchase, deploy, or change permissions without a proportionate approval step. Microsoft’s implementation guidance recommends human confirmation for irreversible or high-impact actions. Treat that as vendor guidance, not a universal standard.
- Access that outlives its purpose: The agent’s owner, tools, task, or operating context changes, but nobody reviews or removes its existing permissions.
A practical governance workflow for each agent
- Register the agent. Document its owner or sponsor, purpose, environment, distinct identity, credentials, tools, data access, delegated authority, and lifecycle state. Make the responsible human or system identifiable.
- Bind the request to its authority. For each task, retain the initiating user or system and the authority delegated to the agent. Specify the task and constraints rather than treating the agent’s identity as blanket approval.
- Reduce permissions before enabling tools. Scope actions and resources to the stated purpose. Remove unnecessary access, prefer time-limited credentials where feasible, and establish how credentials and grants will be revoked.
- Set approval boundaries. Identify actions that are high impact or hard to reverse and require explicit human approval where appropriate. Microsoft guidance names sending, deleting, purchasing, deploying, and changing permissions as examples; an organization should set boundaries that fit its own risks and workflows.
- Make activity investigable. Log the agent identity, initiating user or system, delegated authority, and actions with enough context to investigate what occurred. Decide how logs will be protected and verified; NIST identifies tamper-proof, verifiable agent logging as an open question rather than prescribing one universal method.
- Review and retire access. Revisit grants when ownership, tools, purpose, or context changes. Define who can disable the agent, revoke its access, and recover from an incident, and ensure those steps can be carried out.
How to assess an implementation
When comparing an internal design or a platform, ask for evidence against each of these criteria rather than relying on a general claim of “agent governance.” No universal product winner or single standard architecture is established by the NIST and Microsoft material discussed here.
- Does each agent have a distinct identity, separate from the user and other agents?
- Can credentials be issued, rotated, disabled, and revoked, and can unnecessary standing access be avoided?
- Can access be scoped to the initiating user or system, the task, the resource, and the permitted action?
- Can delegated authority be represented clearly and limited rather than inherited wholesale?
- Can investigators connect actions to the agent, initiator, and authorization, and assess how logs are protected?
- Can policy require human approval for selected high-impact or difficult-to-reverse actions?
- Are sponsorship, access review, disabling, revocation, and recovery covered across the agent’s lifecycle?
Microsoft’s Entra ID Governance documentation describes agent identity governance capabilities including human sponsorship, identity blueprints, and access packages for time-bound, auditable access. Microsoft labels agent governance features as preview in the documentation accessed October 8, 2026. Availability and status are product-specific; verify the current Microsoft documentation before relying on a preview feature for a production control.
What organizations can conclude now
Agent governance is not a choice between legacy IAM and an entirely new identity system. Existing identity and authorization patterns can contribute, but agents need distinct identities, explicit delegation, task-appropriate permissions, useful audit context, and lifecycle ownership. NIST’s ongoing work and Microsoft’s product-specific preview documentation show that implementation is developing; they do not establish a final universal blueprint.
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