Why AI Agent Authentication Can't Be Treated Like User Authentication
For twenty years, identity and access management has been built around one assumption: the thing logging in is a person. A person clicks "authorize," a person holds a session, and if something goes wrong, someone can ask that person directly what happened. Every audit trail, every access review, every compliance control we've built inherits that assumption without ever stating it out loud.
That assumption is quietly breaking down in a growing share of production systems, and most identity infrastructure hasn't caught up yet.
The pattern nobody designed for.
AI agent adoption has moved faster than the identity infrastructure meant to recognize them as distinct actors. A recent analysis covering more than 20,000 organizations between June 2022 and June 2026, spanning over 100 AI products across 74 vendor suites, found AI native vendors growing their enterprise footprint more than 4x in that window, with no comparable shift in how access is...
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