The collapse of traditional identity models
Current identity and access models were built to grant access and authorization levels to human beings and not autonomous software, such as the proliferating number of AI agents. Experts say the human-centric identity models that hand out usernames, roles, and access levels will likely collapse when faced with thousands of autonomous agents making requests every second.
“We are inviting something that simulates human behavior into our environment, and no one is thinking about how to authenticate and authorize this new individual,” Ric Smith, president of products and technology at Okta, tells CSO. “The analogous thing would be you just take a random person off the street, walk them into your building, and let them loose, because technically that’s what people are doing as a result of developing LLMs or developing on LLMs.”
Worse, incorporating AI agents into existing identity models only adds a layer of complexity to identity environments that have already proved problematic, says Steve Stone, SVP of threat discovery and response at Sentinel One.
