The Rise of AI Admins: How to Secure Privileged Access in Autonomous Systems

Read full article from CyberArk here: https://www.cyberark.com/resources/all-blog-posts/when-ai-agents-become-admins-rethinking-privileged-access-in-the-age-of-ai/?utm_source=nhimg

AI Has Joined the Workforce — as a Privileged User

From resetting passwords to managing cloud workloads, AI agents are now performing tasks that once required a human administrator. These agents hold credentials, trigger workflows, and even make autonomous decisions — all with growing access to sensitive systems.

In short, AI has become the newest member of your privileged workforce.

But while human administrators are heavily governed, AI agents often aren’t. Most organizations lack visibility or controls over the credentials, permissions, and behaviors of these autonomous systems. According to the 2025 Identity Security Landscape, 68% of organizations have no security framework for AI or large language models (LLMs), even though 82% recognize the sensitive access risks they create.

The Governance Gap: AI Agents as Privileged Identities

AI agents rely on the same forms of authentication as traditional users — certificates, API tokens, and secrets — yet these are often unmanaged, unmonitored, and long-lived.

When such credentials expire or are compromised, the fallout can be severe: silent service outages, unauthorized access, and large-scale data exposure. And because AI agents frequently operate in production or customer-facing environments, the blast radius of a single failure can be enormous.

To close this gap, organizations must extend the same governance and Privileged Access Management (PAM) discipline applied to humans to the machines acting on their behalf.

Four Key Steps to Secure AI Agents

1- Apply PAM to AI Agents - Treat bots like administrators — enforce least privilege, monitor activity, and restrict access to critical systems.
2- Govern Credentials - Centralize secret and certificate storage. Automate rotation and renewal to prevent stale credentials from becoming attack vectors.
3- Embrace Identity Convergence - Build a single inventory of all AI agents. Assign ownership and define their purpose, actions, and privilege levels.
4- Extend Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) - Apply EPM controls to local or embedded agents to restrict escalation, file-system access, and lateral movement.

A 30-Day Action Plan for Security Leaders

Week 1: Inventory all AI agents and document their credential use.
Week 2: Classify agents by privilege level and prioritize those with access to sensitive data.
Week 3: Integrate credentials into automated lifecycle management systems.
Week 4: Assign ownership and ongoing accountability for every AI agent.

This phased approach helps you transition from ungoverned AI activity to structured, monitored access control in just one month.

The Bigger Picture: Identity Is Expanding

As AI systems evolve, they’re blurring the line between human and machine identity. These entities operate continuously, make autonomous decisions, and increasingly hold high-impact privileges.

Forward-thinking organizations are redefining their identity security models — integrating AI agent management into PAM, secrets management, and machine identity governance frameworks.

Doing so reduces attack surfaces, prevents outages, and meets emerging compliance mandates in an era where AI runs mission-critical operations.

Bottom Line

AI agents are no longer passive assistants — they’re administrators, orchestrators, and decision-makers. And when bots become admins, they deserve the same protection as their human colleagues.