AI Agents Need Identities, Permissions, and Supervisors

Organizations would never allow an unidentified employee to enter multiple systems, retrieve confidential files, change records, and approve transactions without supervision.

Yet some are preparing to give AI agents exactly that level of access.

An AI agent should not be treated as a feature hidden inside an application. It should be treated as a non-human identity operating within the enterprise.

That identity should have a name, an owner, an approved purpose, defined credentials, limited permissions, and a complete activity history.

NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence has identified agent identity and authorization as an emerging enterprise security challenge. Its work asks how agents should authenticate, how their credentials should be issued and revoked, how least privilege should be enforced, how authority should be delegated, and how actions should be traced back to a human authorization.

NIST’s draft Cybersecurity Framework Profile for AI goes further. It recommends treating AI systems separately from other network entities and assigning agents only the permissions required for their roles.

This is a familiar cybersecurity principle applied to a new kind of actor.

An accounts-payable agent should not have administrator access to the entire financial system. A policy-review agent should not be able to publish a final policy without approval. A cybersecurity agent investigating an alert should not automatically isolate critical production systems unless defined conditions are met.

Supervision must also be meaningful. Human-in-the-loop cannot mean placing an approval button in front of an employee who lacks the time, information, or authority to challenge the recommendation.

A supervisor must understand what the agent did, what information it used, what uncertainty remains, and what consequences may follow.

The organization must also know how to suspend the agent, revoke its credentials, and reconstruct its actions during an investigation.