Rethinking Identity Governance for AI Agents: How Teleport and AWS Secure Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol

Read full article here:  https://goteleport.com/blog/securing-model-context-protocol-with-teleport-and-aws/?source=nhimg

As enterprises accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence, a new class of systems is emerging: agentic AI. These are autonomous agents capable of reasoning, decision-making, and interacting with enterprise data and services in real time. From customer support bots to internal automation tools, agentic AI is reshaping how organizations operate. But with this transformation comes a critical challenge—how do we secure these non-human identities (NHIs) without compromising agility, compliance, or control?

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) offers a powerful framework for enabling AI agents to access enterprise data securely and efficiently. It acts as a middleware layer, allowing agents to retrieve context, execute tasks, and respond intelligently based on real-time inputs. However, MCP also introduces new risks that traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems weren’t designed to handle. Static credentials, over-privileged access, and limited auditability are just a few of the vulnerabilities that can arise when AI agents are treated as second-class citizens in the IAM ecosystem.

This is where Teleport, in combination with AWS, delivers a transformative solution. Teleport is a modern access platform built around zero trust principles, identity-aware infrastructure, and dynamic credentialing. By integrating Teleport with MCP, organizations can elevate AI agents to first-class infrastructure identities—subject to the same rigorous controls, policies, and observability as human users or service accounts.

Here’s how this integration addresses the core challenges of securing AI agents:

Treating AI Agents as First-Class Identities
Teleport enables organizations to define AI agents as unique identities within their infrastructure. This means agents can be assigned roles, permissions, and access scopes just like any other user. It’s a shift from treating agents as anonymous services to recognizing them as accountable entities within the IAM framework.

Enforcing Zero Trust and Least Privilege
Teleport’s architecture is built on zero trust principles, ensuring that no identity—human or non-human—is implicitly trusted. Access is granted based on verified identity, contextual policies, and real-time authorization checks. This allows enterprises to enforce least privilege for AI agents, dramatically reducing the attack surface.

Dynamic, Ephemeral Credentials
One of the biggest risks in AI-driven environments is the use of static credentials—hardcoded secrets that can be leaked, misused, or forgotten. Teleport replaces these with ephemeral, just-in-time credentials that expire automatically. This not only enhances security but also simplifies credential rotation and lifecycle management.

Full Auditability and Compliance
Teleport logs every access event, command execution, and session interaction in detail. When AI agents interact with enterprise systems via MCP, those actions are recorded and traceable. This level of observability is essential for meeting compliance requirements, conducting forensic investigations, and maintaining operational transparency.

Seamless Integration with AWS
Teleport integrates natively with AWS services, enabling secure access to EC2 instances, RDS databases, Lambda functions, and more. When paired with MCP, this allows AI agents to interact with AWS-hosted resources in a secure, governed manner—without requiring manual credential management or custom IAM workarounds.

The Strategic Value of Securing NHIs
The rise of agentic AI is not just a technical shift—it’s a governance revolution. As AI agents take on more responsibility within enterprise environments, they must be subject to the same identity lifecycle, access controls, and compliance standards as any other entity. Teleport’s approach, combined with AWS’s infrastructure and Anthropic’s MCP, offers a scalable, secure, and future-proof way to manage this transition.
Organizations that embrace this model will be better positioned to innovate with AI while maintaining trust, accountability, and resilience. It’s not just about securing access—it’s about redefining identity in the age of intelligent automation.