Yes, because the core risk is the same: an identity with access outlives the purpose for which it was granted. AI agents add more runtime action capability, so lifecycle controls need to cover approval, review, revocation, and offboarding in the same governance stream as service accounts and tokens.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
AI agents are operational identities, not just software features. Once they can call tools, read data, or trigger workflows, their access must be governed with the same discipline used for service accounts, API tokens, and other non-human identities. The practical failure mode is simple: an agent is approved for a specific job, but its access remains active after the task, context, or vendor relationship changes.
That matters because lifecycle gaps are where exposure accumulates. NHIs are frequently over-privileged, slow to rotate, and difficult to inventory at scale, which makes stale access hard to spot before it is abused. The broader NHI problem is not theoretical, 91% of former employee tokens remain active after offboarding, and long-lived access often survives the business reason that justified it. Those same conditions apply when an AI agent is left running with durable credentials and broad tool access. The 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity is especially useful here because it captures how lifecycle failures and exposed tokens translate into real exposure. In practice, many security teams discover the problem only after the agent has already accumulated permissions that nobody is actively reviewing.
How It Works in Practice
Treating AI agents under the same lifecycle does not mean treating them identically. It means applying one governance stream for approval, ownership, periodic review, rotation, revocation, and offboarding, while adding agent-specific checks for runtime authority and tool scope. The lifecycle should start with a clear business owner, a defined use case, and a documented expiry condition. If those are missing, the agent is already too open-ended to manage safely.
A workable lifecycle usually includes these controls:
- Pre-approval that ties the agent to a named business purpose and a bounded tool set.
- Credential issuance with the shortest practical validity window, plus a revocation path that works even if the agent is unattended.
- Periodic access review that checks both the identity and the actions it can still perform.
- Offboarding that removes credentials, tokens, integrations, and any standing permissions in the same change window.
The key governance point is that the agent’s access state must be visible to the same inventory and review process used for other NHIs. If an agent can access production systems, ticketing, code repositories, or customer data, its permissions need the same evidence trail as any other privileged non-human identity. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs and NHI Lifecycle Management Guide both reinforce the same operational pattern: lifecycle control only works when ownership, rotation, and revocation are explicit, not implied. These controls tend to break down when the agent is embedded in a fast-moving product workflow and no team owns the offboarding step because the integration is treated as “just automation.”
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter lifecycle control often increases operational overhead, so organisations have to balance agility against blast-radius reduction. The main variation is whether the agent uses temporary delegated access or a more persistent identity. Temporary access is easier to govern, but persistent access is sometimes necessary for long-running workflows, which means the review and revocation process becomes more important, not less.
There is also a meaningful distinction between agents that only recommend actions and agents that execute them. Recommendation-only systems may fit lighter controls, but once an agent can modify records, send messages, deploy code, or invoke external systems, it should be treated as an identity with real operational effect. Another common edge case is vendor-managed agents, where the organisation assumes the provider will handle lifecycle hygiene. Best practice is evolving here, but current guidance suggests the customer still needs ownership of approval, expiry, and revocation because business risk remains local even when the software is hosted elsewhere. When an agent is granted cross-environment access or shared credentials, the lifecycle should be tightened further because compromise or misuse can spread faster across systems. CIS Controls v8 and NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 are useful references for mapping that governance to broader access control and risk management expectations. The hardest cases are agents that inherit access through nested tools or shared pipelines, because the identity looks ordinary while the effective privilege is much broader than it appears.
Risk and Threat Considerations
The material risk is privilege persistence. If an AI agent keeps valid access after its task, owner, or business purpose changes, it becomes an unbounded trust relationship that can be abused, hijacked, or forgotten. That creates exposure even without a sophisticated attacker, and the risk grows quickly when the agent can act across multiple systems.
Failure mechanism: The agent retains credentials, tokens, or delegated permissions beyond the intended lifecycle, then those rights are reused, over-scoped, or captured through compromise of the agent runtime, integration layer, or upstream secret store.
Impact: Organisations can lose control over data access, workflow integrity, and downstream system actions. A stale agent identity can create broad unauthorized access, make incident containment harder, and turn a single compromised integration into multi-system exposure.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 — Lifecycle and Ownership | AI agents are non-human identities that need bounded ownership and offboarding. |
| Recommendation — Assign each agent an owner, expiry, and revocation path before granting access. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC — Access Control | Agent lifecycle hinges on controlling who or what can retain access over time. |
| Recommendation — Review agent access regularly and revoke standing permissions when purpose ends. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | 5 — Account Management | Agent identities require inventory, approval, and removal like other accounts. |
| Recommendation — Maintain an account inventory and remove inactive agent access without delay. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Put every agent that can execute actions into the same inventory, review, and revocation process as other non-human identities. If an agent can change state in production, it should have an owner, an expiry condition, and a removal path before it is ever granted access.
Decision rule: If the agent’s access cannot be cleanly revoked without breaking the organisation’s ability to operate, the access model is too durable. Move that agent toward shorter-lived credentials, narrower tool scope, and explicit re-approval gates.
Practitioner takeaway: The important judgement is not whether an AI agent is “different” from other NHIs, it is whether the organisation can prove that its authority ends when the business purpose ends.
