Security teams in 2026 will encounter a problem they have never faced before: identities that no one remembers creating. An investigation begins with simple questions. Who owns this service account? Which team requested it?
The answer arrives from an unexpected source. An AI agent created it three days ago while executing an automated workflow. No ticket submitted. No approval queue.
This scenario will become routine as organizations deploy agentic AI at scale. These systems do not just consume data or generate reports. They execute tasks, provision resources, and create the infrastructure they need to operate autonomously. When an agent determines it needs API access to a data warehouse or requires credentials to orchestrate a multi-step workflow, it creates those access pathways itself.
The security implications are profound. Traditional identity governance assumes humans request access, managers approve it, and security teams audit the decisions. Agentic AI breaks this model entirely.
The Attribution Problem
Security operations teams rely on attribution to investigate suspicious activity. When a credential exhibits unusual behavior, analysts trace it back to an owner, a creation date, an approval chain, and a business justification. This context determines whether the activity represents legitimate business operations or active compromise.
Agentic AI removes this context. An identity created autonomously by an agent carries no inherent attribution. Which agent created it? What business logic drove that decision?
Without answers to these questions, security teams cannot distinguish between normal autonomous behavior and credential compromise that looks similar. Consider a realistic scenario. An identity created by an AI agent begins accessing sensitive customer data across multiple regions at 2 AM. Is this legitimate workflow execution or an attacker using compromised agent credentials?
The behavior alone cannot answer that question. Traditional indicators of compromise do not apply. The access patterns might look identical whether the agent is functioning as designed or operating under attacker control.
The problem compounds when multiple agents operate in the same environment. An organization running twenty different AI agents for various business functions might have each agent creating its own service accounts, API keys, and access tokens. Within weeks, hundreds of AI-generated identities exist across the infrastructure. Security teams lose track of which identities support which business processes.
When suspicious activity emerges, the investigation stalls immediately because no one can establish the legitimate baseline for that identity’s behavior. Organizations that allow agents to create identities without robust attribution tracking will lose investigative capability. By mid-2026, the organizations that maintain security visibility will implement specific requirements.
Agents must log every identity creation decision with full context. Created identities must carry metadata tags indicating which agent created them, when, and why. Audit trails must provide security teams with complete visibility into autonomous identity creation. This includes the business justification, the specific workflow that triggered the creation, and the expected behavior patterns for that identity.
The technical implementation matters. A simple log entry stating “Agent X created identity Y” provides insufficient context. Effective attribution requires the agent to document what permissions were granted, which systems the identity can access, what operations it should perform, and what deviations from normal behavior should trigger alerts.
Identity Security Requires Executive Leadership
The CISO role has grown beyond the capacity of a single executive position. Modern security organizations must defend against ransomware, manage cloud infrastructure security, oversee application security, ensure compliance across multiple frameworks, and now govern AI systems operating with unprecedented autonomy. Identity security alone has evolved into a discipline requiring specialized expertise in API security, cloud identity architectures, behavioral analytics, and AI system governance.
The timing of this shift is not coincidental. Three converging factors make dedicated identity security leadership essential now. First, the explosion of non-human identities has created a management challenge that dwarfs human identity governance. Most organizations now have three to five times as many service accounts, API keys, and machine identities as they have human users.
Second, cloud infrastructure has made identity the new perimeter. Traditional network security controls cannot protect data that lives in SaaS applications and multi-cloud environments. Third, AI agents represent a category of identity that behaves fundamentally differently from both humans and traditional service accounts.
The structural solution is emerging. Organizations will create a dedicated Chief Identity Security Officer or Chief Identity Officer reporting directly to the CISO. This is not empire building. This reflects the reality that identity security now determines the success or failure of cloud transformation, AI adoption, and digital business operations.
The executive responsible for identity security must have authority to enforce policies across development teams, infrastructure teams, and business units deploying AI systems. Without executive-level authority, identity governance becomes a suggestion that teams ignore when it conflicts with velocity goals. The evidence supports this change.
Organizations that elevate identity security to executive leadership detect identity-based breaches significantly faster than those treating it as a subset of general security operations. The difference is not marginal. We are seeing detection time improvements of 70% or more when identity security receives dedicated executive focus. This improvement comes from specialized monitoring tools, dedicated analyst teams, and executive prioritization of identity-related security investments.
This becomes a competitive advantage. Organizations that structure their security leadership around modern threat vectors will outperform competitors still operating with organizational charts designed for perimeter-based security. It also becomes a talent differentiator. Security professionals with deep identity expertise want to work for organizations that recognize the strategic importance of that expertise.
The First Wave of Agent Credential Compromises
In 2026, we will see the first major breaches where attackers compromise AI agent credentials rather than targeting human user accounts. The attack pattern is straightforward. Agents operate with delegated permissions across multiple systems without requiring human approval at each step. They need this capability to function.
An agent orchestrating data pipeline operations requires access to source databases, transformation tools, and destination systems. An agent managing infrastructure provisioning needs permissions spanning compute, storage, and networking resources. These broad permissions make agent credentials high-value targets.
An attacker who compromises agent credentials inherits all the permissions that agent holds. Unlike human users who operate at human speed, agents can execute at machine speed. An attacker using compromised agent credentials can access systems, exfiltrate data, and modify configurations faster than any human adversary.
The attack vectors are familiar. Phishing campaigns targeting developers who manage agent configurations. Supply chain compromises introducing malicious code into agent frameworks. Credential theft through misconfigured repositories or leaked environment variables.
Configuration files containing agent credentials get pushed to public GitHub repositories. Developer workstations compromised through malware harvest environment variables containing agent API keys. Third-party libraries used in agent frameworks contain backdoors providing credential access to attackers.
The difference is the blast radius. Compromised agent credentials provide attackers with legitimate-looking access that can persist undetected because the activity appears consistent with normal agent behavior. Traditional security controls struggle to flag this activity. The agent credential has proper authorization.
The systems being accessed are ones the agent legitimately uses. The volume of operations might be high, but agents routinely execute operations at scale. Security teams lack the baseline understanding of normal agent behavior needed to detect when that behavior turns malicious.
Defense requires comprehensive visibility. Organizations need complete discovery of every AI identity operating in their environments. This includes development environments where agents are tested, staging environments where they are validated, and production environments where they execute business-critical workflows. Most organizations lack this visibility today.
They know which human users have access to which systems. They do not know which AI agents exist, what permissions those agents hold, or how those permissions are being used. This gap creates risk that organizations cannot quantify until it materializes as a breach.
This invisibility becomes quantifiable risk in 2026. When the first major breach through compromised agent credentials makes headlines, organizations will calculate what inadequate AI identity visibility costs. Board members will ask direct questions. How many AI agents operate in our environment?
What permissions do they hold? How do we detect when agent credentials are compromised? Organizations that cannot answer these questions will face difficult conversations about security program maturity.
Regulatory scrutiny will follow. Cyber insurance carriers will add AI identity governance requirements to their underwriting criteria. Organizations without comprehensive AI identity management programs will face higher premiums or coverage exclusions. The cost of inadequate visibility will become concrete and measurable.
Building Security for Autonomous Systems
The path forward requires organizations to extend existing identity security practices to cover AI agents while recognizing that agents introduce fundamentally new challenges. Discovery must encompass AI identities across all environments. Governance must account for autonomous decision-making. Monitoring must distinguish between legitimate agent behavior and suspicious activity that looks similar.
Organizations should implement attribution tracking now, before agentic AI deployment scales beyond manageable levels. Every agent that creates identities should log those decisions with complete business context. Security teams should establish baseline behavior profiles for each agent operating in the environment. Incident response playbooks should include specific procedures for investigating potentially compromised agent credentials.
These playbooks need different detection criteria than human credential compromise because agents behave differently than humans. Response procedures must account for the speed at which compromised agents can execute malicious actions. Containment strategies must consider the cross-system permissions that agents typically hold.
The organizations that treat AI identity security as an afterthought will face preventable breaches. The organizations that build security into their AI deployment strategies from the beginning will maintain the visibility and control required to operate autonomous systems safely. This distinction will become clear in 2026 when the theoretical risks of AI security become concrete breaches with real business impact.
Identity security has always been difficult. Agentic AI makes it exponentially more complex. The question is not whether organizations will face these challenges. The question is whether they will prepare for them before or after the first breach.
About the Author
Paul Nguyen is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Permiso, a leader in identity security, providing advanced solutions to help organizations detect and respond to threats targeting human and non-human identities across cloud environments. Prior to Permiso, Nguyen founded Invotas, a pioneer in security orchestration, which was subsequently acquired by FireEye. At FireEye, he served as the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Product Management.
With over 25 years of experience in the cybersecurity industry, Nguyen began his career as a white hat hacker at @stake (later acquired by Symantec) and Neohapsis (acquired by Cisco).
