Manage AI agents
Early Access release
Okta manages AI agent identities by registering, securing, and governing them. This ensures AI agents are accountable and operate with least privilege, so they become a managed part of your digital workforce instead of a security risk. Okta for AI solution enables human to agent connections, as opposed to agent-to-agent connections.
Benefits
Using Okta to manage your AI agents gives you centralized security and control over their identities.
- Enforce least privilege
- Minimize an AI agent's attack surface by granting access with policy-constrained scopes and methods.
- Centralized control and compliance reporting
- Centralized management brings every agent action into a unified control plane, making interactions fully auditable within Okta System Logs.
- Elimination of standing privileges
- Time-bound access and enforced policies eliminate the need for risky, permanent credentials for agents and users.
- Enhanced security posture
- Security teams confidently deploy and connect AI agents with clear visibility into connections, permissions, and risks.
- Reduced user friction
- The agent completes tasks for users automatically, so they enjoy a seamless experience without repeated access requests.
Key features and components
This end-to-end framework establishes control across the entire lifecycle of an AI agent, ensuring visibility, least privilege, and governance.
| Setting | Goal |
Key Action |
|---|---|---|
|
Formalize an AI agent's identity. |
Super admins establish the agent as a first-class, non-human identity in the Universal Directory (UD) with assigned human ownership. |
|
|
Enforce least privilege access. |
Apply rule-based access policies using Managed Connections, dictating allowed resources and required protocols. |
|
|
Enforce least privilege access and help meet compliance requirements. |
Streamline requesting access to linked apps and periodically certify and remediate existing access. |
How it works
The following workflow details how visibility, least privilege, and governance are achieved across the AI agent lifecycle by implementing the three-phase security model.
Register and provision
Once the system identifies an AI agent, the super admin registers it as a workload principal in the Universal Directory. This establishes the agent as a first-class, non-human object, ensuring clear governance through assigned human ownership and defined accountability. Each agent is assigned to a human owner who serves as the designated point of accountability for the agent's identity and lifecycle. While super admins perform the technical setup and configuration, the owner is responsible for certifying its intended use, approving access requirements, and overseeing the agent's long-term compliance. This process provides the agent with a formal identity record in UD, assigns clear human accountability, and issues the necessary authentication credentials for policy creation.
Secure and authorize
This phase establishes an enterprise control plane for registered Okta AI agents called Managed Connections. Okta AI agents are designed to request tokens from Okta when accessing external resources to perform tasks. Managed connections allow you to define precisely which resources an AI agent is authorized to access by requesting a token.
You can connect an AI agent to an authorization server that's supported by Cross App Access, which grants the AI agent access to resources that are protected by an Okta custom authorization server. In these scenarios, you can specify a predefined set of scopes that an AI agent is permitted to request. This enforces the principle of least privilege and removes the need for end users to interact with consent pages from external resources.
Managed connections can also facilitate access to vaulted static credentials, such as pre-configured service accounts and secrets. Regardless of the method used, the AI agent's access to external resources is governed by Okta based on admin-defined policies.
Govern
In this final phase, AI agents are integrated into Okta Identity Governance processes to maintain security, compliance, and auditing throughout their lifecycle. You can manage user access to agents through an Access Requests resource catalog with defined approval policies. Time-bound access automatically revokes privileges when the approved period ends, preventing indefinite standing access. Regular Access Certifications campaigns and detailed System Logs ensure continuous auditability of all agent-related actions.