How to Secure and Govern Every AI Agent with Agent Identity Security

Read full article here: https://www.sailpoint.com/blog/sailpoint-agent-identity-security/?utm_source=nhimg

AI agents are no longer science fiction, they’re here, embedded in our workflows, making decisions, and interacting with sensitive business data every day. Unlike human employees, these “digital teammates” are not onboarded by HR, vetted by compliance, or trained by managers. Yet they often receive the same level of system access as real staff.

This creates a new challenge: AI agents act as shadow workers, invisible to traditional identity processes and operating outside of normal checks and balances. Without governance, they can quietly accumulate privileges, impersonate users, or leak data, all without anyone noticing.

The Growing Governance Gap

A recent SailPoint survey revealed that 96% of technology professionals view AI agents as a growing security threat. The risks are not theoretical: 80% of leaders say their agents have already taken unintended actions such as accessing or sharing the wrong data. By 2028, analysts predict AI agents will directly influence 15% of all business decisions, making oversight more urgent than ever.

Without proper governance, AI agents can:

• Autonomously access sensitive data and trigger leaks.
• Escalate user permissions beyond what was intended.
• Be tricked into exposing credentials.
• Violate regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.
• Operate like insider threats, autonomous, persistent, and unmonitored.

These issues highlight a dangerous gap: while human identities are governed by established processes, AI agents are often left unmanaged.

Introducing SailPoint Agent Identity Security

To close this gap, SailPoint has launched Agent Identity Security (AIS), a purpose-built solution to govern the full lifecycle of AI agents. Built on the SailPoint Atlas platform and integrated with the Identity Security Cloud and Data Access Security, AIS brings AI agents under the same rigorous controls that organizations already apply to employees, contractors, and machine identities.

AIS provides:

• Automatic onboarding of agents from AWS, Azure, GCP, and other platforms, each enriched with full business and access context.
• Ownership and succession planning so every agent has clear accountability.
• Tool governance across service accounts, ensuring agents like HR chatbots or IT assistants don’t become hidden risks.
• Recurring certification and review to prevent permission creep.
• Audit trails and over-permission reporting, giving compliance teams full visibility into direct and indirect access pathways.
• Unified governance of human, machine, and AI identities within a single platform.

Why It Matters

By treating AI agents as first-class identities, AIS enables enterprises to:

• Eliminate blind spots across digital workforces.
• Prevent over-permissioning and data leaks.
• Simplify compliance with transparent oversight.
• Govern humans, machines, and AI agents in a unified way.

The Future of Identity Security

The rise of AI agents is inevitable but unmanaged AI is a ticking time bomb. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that secure these digital workers with the same rigor as their human workforce.

With Agent Identity Security, SailPoint delivers a path forward: centralized, automated, and future-ready governance for every identity, human or non-human.