Topic starter
06/11/2026 6:38 pm
TL;DR: Amazon and Walmart’s contrasting responses to AI shopping agents show that a valid password, session cookie, or OAuth token does not prove an agent is authorised to act, according to Newcore. NHI governance now has to treat agent identity, scope, and revocation as separate control decisions, not assumptions hidden inside authentication.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Newcore: “Access Is Not Authority: What the Amazon and Muse Standoff Means for Your Agents”.
Key questions
Q: How should organizations manage credentials for AI agents?
A: Organizations should transition from hard-coded credentials to runtime-fetched credentials that enhance security by ensuring that tokens are not stored permanently.
Q: Why does authentication not prove an AI agent is authorised?
A: Authentication only proves the agent presented a valid secret, certificate, or token.
Q: What is the best way to revoke an AI agent's access quickly?
A: The fastest way is a single control action that disables the agent’s identity or its delegated credential at the source, such as deactivating the service account, revoking the token, or disabling the certificate.
Practitioner guidance
- Define each AI agent as a separately governed identity Assign an owner, a purpose, and a narrow task profile before the agent is allowed to act in production systems.
- Separate authentication from authorisation decisions Require an explicit policy decision for each agent action path instead of treating login success as permission to proceed.
- Replace standing tool secrets with short-lived delegated access Broker access through a gateway or control layer so the agent never holds long-lived credentials for downstream systems.
Bottom line: AI agents change the identity problem by separating valid access from legitimate authority, which makes simple authentication checks insufficient.
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06/11/2026 6:41 pm
Access reviews are the wrong primary control when an agent’s authority is transient. A review process assumes access exists long enough to be examined, challenged, and re-certified. An AI agent can obtain, use, and shed access within one task flow, so the review artefact arrives after the risk window has already closed. The implication is that governance has to move to issuance and execution time, not rely on retrospective certification.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do per-agent profiles reduce AI access risk?
A: Per-agent profiles reduce AI access risk by giving each agent its own identity, permissions, secrets, logs, and owner. That separation limits blast radius, makes entitlements easier to review, and lets you revoke one agent without disturbing others. It also prevents shared credentials from hiding which agent acted, which is a common audit failure.
👉 Read our full editorial: AI agent authority requires identity, limits, and revocation