Use explicit delegated permissions for the task, not a copied human identity. That keeps the audit trail tied to the agent’s scope, avoids credential sharing, and makes it easier to prove what the agent was authorised to do.
Separate delegation from human identity at the permission boundary
The cleanest model is to make the agent act under a task-scoped delegated permission, not under a copied person’s account. That preserves accountability, keeps approval and revocation tied to the work being done, and avoids blending human and machine authority into one identity record.
For delegation flows that must represent “on behalf of” behaviour, token exchange is the right pattern because it carries the delegated context without turning the agent into a surrogate human user. Standards such as RFC 8693: OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange are useful when teams need a clear separation between the original subject and the delegated subject.
Where teams blur that boundary, the operational failure is usually not just policy confusion. It becomes impossible to tell whether a human, an agent, or a shared credential initiated the action, which weakens audit quality and makes access review far less reliable.
Two NHIMG references are especially useful for this distinction: Human vs Non-Human Identity clarifies where people and machine access diverge, while Agentic AI Identity Guide shows how delegation, registration, authentication and retirement should be treated as distinct lifecycle concerns for agents.
Keep the agent’s scope narrow, explicit, and revocable
Delegation should describe one task domain, one authority boundary, and one revocation path. If the agent needs broader access over time, expand scope deliberately rather than letting a copied human identity accumulate permissions by convenience.
This matters because a human account usually carries entitlements that were designed for a person’s full job role, not for one automated action path. Once those entitlements are reused by an agent, the blast radius becomes much larger than the task actually requires.
For teams mapping this to identity controls, the main question is whether the agent can be limited to the minimum rights needed for the delegated action and then removed cleanly after use. NHI Lifecycle Management Guide is useful here because lifecycle discipline, especially provisioning, rotation, and offboarding, is what prevents delegated access from becoming permanent access.
When the business insists on persistent automation, the safer pattern is to preserve a dedicated agent identity with bounded permissions rather than to reissue a human identity token or password to the system. That keeps later reviews focused on the agent’s actual function, not on inferred human intent.
Design the audit trail so evidence matches the actor
Security teams should be able to prove three things from logs: who approved the delegation, what scope was granted, and what the agent actually did. If those three items are not separable in telemetry, the control is too weak for regulated or high-impact workflows.
Auditability is why many teams standardise on explicit delegated claims, short-lived tokens, and separate service or agent principals instead of shared user credentials. The goal is not only stronger security, but also cleaner investigations, better recertification, and less dispute over whether an action was authorised.
For more formal identity governance and access review thinking, Identity Security Programme Guide is helpful because it treats identity boundaries, ownership, and governance as operating model issues rather than just technical implementation details. Ultimate Guide to NHIs, Regulatory and Audit Perspectives is also relevant when the organisation needs evidence that delegated access can be reviewed and explained later.
If the same credential or token can be used by both the person and the agent, the audit trail will eventually misstate attribution. That is the point at which the architecture stops being merely untidy and starts becoming a governance problem.
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 addresses the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 sets the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-9 — Service Identification and Authentication | Covers machine or agent-to-system authentication distinct from a human user |
| AC-3 — Access Enforcement | Controls whether delegated actions stay within the approved task scope | |
| AU-2 — Event Logging | Supports separate evidence for approval, execution, and attribution in delegated flows | |
| Recommendation — Use IA-9 to authenticate the agent with its own machine identity, not a copied user account. Enforce task-scoped permissions so the agent can act only within the delegated boundary. Log delegation grants and agent actions so approval and execution remain distinguishable. | ||
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-10 — Human Use of NHI | Addresses the misuse that occurs when human and non-human identity boundaries are blurred |
| NHI-04 — Insecure Authentication | Applies when agents rely on copied or weakly separated authentication material | |
| Recommendation — Prevent humans from reusing agent credentials and keep delegated access strictly non-shared. Issue separate agent authentication material instead of reusing human credentials. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to verify: Confirm that the agent has its own delegated subject, its own credential or token path, and its own revocation mechanism. If a reviewer cannot distinguish human approval from agent execution in logs, the design still depends on human identity leakage.
Decision rule: If the system action can be described as “the agent did X on behalf of Y,” use delegation with explicit scope. If the design requires the agent to behave as though it were the human user, treat that as a red flag and redesign the access model before rollout.
Common mistake: Teams often solve convenience by copying a user’s session, API token, or long-lived credential into automation. That reduces friction in the short term, but it erases the very separation needed for safe approval, review, and incident response.
Practitioner takeaway: Separate the right to approve from the right to execute, and separate both from the identity used to authenticate the agent. When those layers stay distinct, delegation is auditable and revocable instead of becoming a disguised shared account.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- What is the difference between human identity governance and AI agent governance?
- How should security teams govern machine identity credentials in agentic AI environments?
- How should security teams handle AI agent visibility?
- How should security teams monitor AI agent activity without disrupting developers?