Three Ways to Give an AI Agent an Identity

2026-07-07

There are three primary paradigms for granting AI agents an identity: borrowing the user's identity, granting the agent its own token/API key, and giving the agent its own identity. On top of any of these models, there is a layer of plumbing such as Okta Cross App Access, agent control planes, or SPIFFE/SPIRE. Cloud providers are offering the third model as a service.