IBM makes Agent Identity generally available: an owner and short-lived access for every agent

Monday, 2 November 2026By Sridhar Mukkandi1 min read

IBM made Agent Identity generally available on 26 October, ahead of its TechXchange 2026 conference. It lets organisations register AI agents in a central inventory with their owner and metadata, classify each agent's risk, record the tool connections it is approved to use, and manage its lifecycle.

For access, it uses OAuth-based, short-lived, task-scoped tokens, so an agent holds only what one step needs. For systems that can't accept delegated tokens, HashiCorp Vault issues just-in-time, target-specific credentials. It works with IBM Verify and watsonx Orchestrate, and IBM describes evaluating an agent's risk while it runs and adjusting its access when that risk changes.

So what

You don't need a product to start: a list of every agent, its owner, the tools it may call and when its access ends is most of the value. Any agent without an owner should be read-only.

SourceIBMwww.ibm.com/new/announcements/ibm-agent-identity-is-now-generall Go deeper · EssayRead-only first: how much access should an agent get?

Drafted with AI from the original source, then checked and edited by Sridhar Mukkandi. Spotted a mistake? Write to hello@tarkika.com and we'll correct it here.

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