AI agents are sprouting up everywhere, promising to make our lives easier by knowing how to do whatever needs doing. That means they need to access resources such as services, tools, and data, but that access should not be unlimited. With AI now embedded into 25% of applications, operating responsibly is vital. To do so, resources should only be accessible in the appropriate context, and application programming interfaces (APIs) are the gatekeepers for doing so.
Standards promote APIs as a structured intermediary.
APIs are a structured intermediary. Invoking APIs creates an execution space where actors find resources, access is controlled, and authorisation is verified. APIs are flexible, reducing exposure yet accommodating a variety of business-approved actions at the same time. The downside of flexibility is the lack of standards which inhibit interoperability.
Emerging standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), Open Agentic Schema Framework (OASF), LangChain Agent Protocol, and Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) are a step in the right direction. They promote thoughtful API design and the use of APIs as the primary external interface within agentic ecosystems. Ecosystems of services, tools and data that agents will use to accomplish their self-directed workplans.
Secure APIs using infrastructure services.
Today’s business applications expose their functionality via APIs, but APIs do not function alone. Surrounding infrastructure is necessary for APIs to deliver security, performance, and governance at scale, but API sprawl has become a critical pain point for 58% of IT leaders. Infrastructure services must therefore increase in robustness to operate as intended.
API Gateways serve as the central entry point for API traffic and consolidate cross-API functions such as user access, authorisation and service discovery. Firewalls filter ports, support routing rules and protect against malformed protocol requests. Authorisation proxies implement advanced authorisation and policy lookups.
APIs are the gate leading into business applications. Every integration passes through them, making them the most exposed part of the digital application surface. Appropriate infrastructure services are crucial to streamlining, enhancing, and enable proper validation of requests to APIs.
Dynamic validation will replace static validation.
When one AI agent lacks permission for a specific action, it can collaborate with another agent that does have permission. This allows workflows to continue without violating access boundaries. For example, a shopping assistant might request a discount code from a fulfillment agent instead of pulling it directly from a sensitive database. APIs facilitate this interaction while preserving separation of duties. This works well today because agents can act on behalf of a human user or role.
Users and roles represent static permission schemes readily supported by current identity and policy systems. Looking ahead, this static, predetermined validation will become insufficient as it is conceivable that agents themselves will eventually possess their own identity, or multiple identities. This will increase the need for strong guardrails to govern access to resources across a wide variety of situations. Eventually, strong governance, including dynamic zero-trust security measures, which validate requestor, target resource, and action at run-time, must replace preassigned privileges, ensuring access decisions adapt to context, risk, and intent.
API-first designs will rise.
APIs are vital for AI agents because the agents need clear delineation of which resources they can access and which security context to use for every action they take. The more agents deployed, the more resources they will access and the more requests they will make, all through APIs. If a single agent executes multiple tasks, there may be multiple authorisations using multiple security contexts. The need for capable APIs intensifies as the number of agents involved increases. APIs must enable appropriate access, automatically and at extremely high scale.
Today, users gain access to resources through applications and custom APIs. Moving forward, standardised APIs will emerge as the strategic control point where agentic AI systems and line-of-business resources interact across network, organizational, and industry boundaries. API-first thinking will lead us into the agentic AI age offering governance, interoperability and scale.
