Identity Was Built for Humans. AI Agents Change the Rules.

For years, we’ve treated enterprise identity as an authentication problem. We ask how many users are on SSO, how many have MFA enabled, and how many stale accounts are still floating around. Those metrics matter, and most security teams have worked hard to move them in the right direction, but they also assume something that used to be true most of the time: there’s a human behind the action. AI agents break that assumption.

Agents are already operating inside production environments, especially in engineering and ops teams. They’re writing code, querying databases, triggering workflows, and touching systems we used to reserve for humans. And that shifts the question. It’s no longer just “who are you,” but “who gave you permission to do this?”

That is why we built StrongDM ID, an identity provider explicitly designed for AI agents. It enables developers to register agents with unique, verifiable identities and link each one to a human sponsor at creation. It preserves a transparent chain of delegation from person to agent to action.

When a person takes an action inside enterprise systems, the organization knows what to ask. Who is this? What authority do they have? Who approved it?

When an agent acts, those answers are often unclear. Many teams still rely on shared service accounts, hardcoded API keys, and credential forwarding to enable autonomous systems. The action may be logged, but the delegation is invisible, and accountability becomes ambiguous.

At a small scale, that is manageable. At enterprise scale, it becomes a governance failure.

Identity systems built for workforce login assume human lifecycles and IT-managed provisioning. Agents invert those assumptions. They are created automatically, may exist only for the duration of a task, and can scale far beyond the number of human users.

StrongDM ID is built on modern, open identity standards, enabling seamless integration with existing enterprise systems. It incorporates proof-of-possession mechanisms and token exchange models designed for secure, verifiable delegation between humans and agents. It also supports shared signals so connected systems can consume identity and session status changes in near real time.

Boards aren’t going to ask how many agents you have. They will ask what happened when an autonomous system created risk, who authorized it, and whether that authority can be traced clearly to a human decision.

Identity systems will either adapt to autonomous actors or become a blind spot in enterprise governance. Authentication defined the last era of identity, but delegation will define the next.

Learn more about StrongDM ID at id.strongdm.ai.