View and inventory AI agent identities in your Microsoft Entra tenant by listing all application and agent identities, then mapping each one to an owner, purpose, permissions and authentication method. Reconcile that inventory against active sign-ins and consent grants so orphaned or shadow agents stand out. Review it regularly to catch dormant identities and privilege creep.
How to build a usable AI agent identity inventory in Microsoft Entra
Start with every application registration, enterprise application and service principal that can act as an AI agent, including copilots, automation apps and custom orchestrators. For each one, record the owner, business purpose, tenant, environment, permissions, consent type and authentication method. If you cannot explain why it exists or who can change it, it is already a governance gap.
A useful inventory is not just a list of objects. It is a joined view of identity, consent and runtime activity so you can tell which agents are sanctioned, which are dormant, and which are still in use but no longer match the business need.
What to reconcile so shadow agents and stale access stand out
Reconcile the inventory against sign-in activity, OAuth consent grants, app role assignments and API permissions. That comparison shows which agent identities are active, which have never been exercised, and which may have accumulated access that no longer fits their role. The goal is to expose drift between what was approved and what is actually present in the tenant.
Pay particular attention to agents with delegated consent, broad Graph permissions, cross-environment access or no clear human owner. Those patterns usually indicate either a forgotten integration or an identity that was created for a narrow use case and then allowed to expand without review. A current inventory should make those cases obvious at a glance.
How often to review and what signals matter most
Review the inventory regularly, not just when a project launches or a security issue appears. Agent identities can become stale quickly because teams test them, hand them off, or leave them running after the original workflow changes. Regular review catches dormant identities, unused permissions and changes in authentication method before they become hard to unwind.
For Microsoft Entra tenants, the highest-value signals are ownership gaps, inactive sign-ins, consent changes, unusually broad permissions, and identities that can still authenticate even though no business process references them. Those are the conditions that usually separate a healthy fleet from one that has grown by accumulation.
Risk and Threat Considerations
AI agent identities create a governance and exposure problem when they are easy to create, hard to own, and rarely reviewed. If an identity can still authenticate after the business case has expired, it can keep access to data, APIs and automation paths long after anyone is watching it closely.
Failure mechanism: Orphaned or shadow agents persist because consent, permissions and runtime use are not reconciled into one inventory, so stale identities retain access and unnoticed privilege creep builds over time.
Impact: The tenant accumulates hidden access paths, making misuse, accidental overreach and later incident response harder because no one can quickly prove which agent is legitimate, active or still authorized.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 addresses the attack surface, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 sets the technical controls, and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 defines the regulatory obligations.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | ASI03 — Identity & Privilege Abuse | AI agent identities and permissions can drift into overreach. |
| Recommendation — Apply ASI03 to constrain agent identities to the minimum delegated authority they need. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Agent inventories must track authentication method and lifecycle. |
| AC-6 — Least Privilege | Inventorying permissions and consent supports least-privilege review for agents. | |
| AU-6 — Audit Record Review, Analysis, and Reporting | Reconciling inventory to sign-ins depends on reviewing activity signals. | |
| Recommendation — Manage and rotate agent authenticators so stale credentials are revoked promptly. Review agent permissions against least privilege and remove unused access. Correlate sign-in and consent activity to surface dormant or shadow agent identities. | ||
| ISO/IEC 27001:2022 | A.5.16 — Identity management | The topic centers on identifying and governing who and what can act in the tenant. |
| Recommendation — Maintain a complete identity inventory with owners, purpose and authorization status. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to verify: Verify that every agent identity has a named owner, an explicit purpose, a current authentication method and a permission set that matches the workflow it actually performs. If any of those fields are missing, treat the identity as incomplete until proven otherwise.
Decision rule: If an AI agent can sign in but its purpose, consent trail or owner cannot be tied to a live business process, quarantine it for review before you renew permissions or expand its scope. If the agent is still needed, reissue the inventory entry with a tighter permission model and a review date.
Practitioner takeaway: The inventory is only useful when it connects configuration to real use, because AI agent governance fails first at attribution, then at access drift, and only later at obvious compromise.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- Guide: Shadow AI and AI Agent Discovery Guide
- How do you disable AI agent identities in a Microsoft Entra tenant?
- How do you manage AI agent identities in Microsoft Entra?
- How do you secure AI agent identities with Microsoft Entra Conditional Access?
- How are AI agent identities created in Microsoft Entra Agent ID?
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on October 20, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org