AI now plays a key role in today’s organizations, and with its adoption comes the clear need for dedicated AI security solutions. In fact, securing AI agents is a top-five priority for 93% of organizations today.
This urgency comes as it becomes more common for teams to run agentic AI workloads for analyzing data, making decisions, and taking actions inside critical systems. But the moment an AI agent acts for you, it stops just being software and becomes an identity. And like any identity, if it has too much privileged access or weakly protected secrets, attackers can use it as a shortcut into your environment.
Why Agentic AI Changes the Security Risk
AI agents do far more than provide answers. They can retrieve records, call APIs, spin up cloud resources, apply code updates, or move data between systems. This is automation with real agency and authority attached, as an agent may apply reason and take action to reach a goal, even if it is an unintended action from the user’s point of view. This is why closing the agentic AI security gap requires organizations to manage AI agent access as if they were human, going far beyond traditional perimeter defenses. Since AI workloads can run as non-human identities in cloud infrastructure and hold IAM roles, API keys, and service credentials at scale, adequately securing them requires a strategy that treats every workload as a privileged identity.
Whether your company chooses to use AWS Bedrock agents, Azure AI / OpenAI workloads, Salesforce Agentforce, ServiceNow, or even custom agentic pipelines, every agent must be identified, inventoried, risk scored, and analyzed for unintended privilege escalation. Understanding potential blast radius is critical to AI Security Posture Management.
Another key point is that many AI agents execute locally in privileged environments, like developer workstations, and therefore inherit the privileges of the user running them. This means these non-human identities (NHIs) operate within the exact same operating system privilege model as any other process, but dramatically increase NHI risk if endpoints are over-permissioned. This is why enforcing least privilege on endpoints becomes the critical control for safely containing AI-driven automation.
BeyondTrust approaches agentic AI security as an identity problem, but identity alone doesn’t create risk. Privilege does. That’s why we emphasize a privilege-centric approach that finds, controls, and protects Paths to Privilege™ across all human, non-human, and agentic AI identities.
Enabling AI Governance
Agentic AI adoption is expanding rapidly.
Altogether, this explosion of agentic AI shows just how critical it is to govern AI agent identities and prevent shadow AI, unmanaged models, and agents operating with excessive permissions. Agentic AI workloads often create a blind spot in the identity fabric, where the relationships between users, data, and autonomous processes are obscured through misconfigurations or account inclusion in nested groups
BeyondTrust Identity Security Insights® and Password Safe® close this gap by providing deep identity intelligence across the entire environment. For IT and security executives, this means:
- Agentic Workload Discovery: Automatically identifying the AI agents and service accounts that are interacting with your infrastructure.
- Identity Posture and Privilege Graphing: Identifying overprivileged agentic workloads and misconfigured IAM roles via our identity privilege graph, mapping True Privilege™ and blast radius across cloud environments.
- Securing AI Credentials: Rotating and providing lifecycle management to the secrets and credentials agentic workloads need to operate.
By consolidating this intelligence and protection, CISOs and other executives gain the clarity needed to make risk-informed decisions, helping ensure that AI deployment doesn’t come at the cost of compliance or security posture.
AI Observability and Intelligence – How BeyondTrust Identity Security Insights Helps You Understand AI Privilege Risk
One of today’s most daunting security challenges is that most organizations cannot clearly see where their AI agents are running, nor what they can do. BeyondTrust’s Identity Security Insights solution helps close this gap by providing the observability needed to govern AI identities as rigorously as human ones.
The BeyondTrust solution identifies non-human identities, including AI, across cloud, SaaS, and internal deployments. It helps teams understand which agents exist, what systems they touch, and whether their permissions match their intended purpose. Using True Privilege™ graphs and identity security intelligence, you can quickly understand and prioritize based on real-world risk. With this information, you can start to reduce unnecessary access and shrink the blast radius before something goes wrong.
Identity Security Insights also goes beyond just enumerating entitlements—it maps the effective power of each identity. Cloud and SaaS roles often hide complex inheritance chains that create unintended access paths. Our product highlights these hidden escalation paths so you can cut back standing access, prevent undesirable elevation of privilege, and ensure agents only have the privileges they need.
Identity Security Insights is part of the BeyondTrust Pathfinder platform approach to privilege-centric identity security, helping teams understand True Privilege: what any identity can actually do in practice, including hidden, inherited, and cross-system access relationships.
On top of that, Identity Security Insights provides actionable remediation guidance, with dozens of AI-specific posture recommendations. You can right-size permissions, break inheritance loops, and apply just in time access where appropriate.
The goal is simple: every AI agent should operate with the minimum required access and without dormant privileges that could be misused.
Protection – Securing the Secrets Behind AI Workloads with Password Safe
Most AI workloads rely on a set of sensitive secrets, just like a human user. These include API keys, access tokens, database passwords, cloud credentials, and service account keys. Frequently, these secrets end up embedded in code, configuration files, logs, or CI/CD pipelines. But all too often, temporary workarounds become permanent solutions, making them one of the easiest targets for attackers.
How Do You Secure AI Agents with Password Safe?
Password Safe centralizes and protects these secrets so your AI workloads don’t become an attacker’s easiest entry point. It provides a secure vault for storing all credentials used by human users and AI agents. Instead of leaving secrets scattered across the environment, they are stored in a single protected location with strict access control.
Password Safe also automates credential rotation. AI workloads are highly dynamic, so manual rotation is unrealistic and unsafe. Auto-rotation helps ensure secrets never remain valid longer than necessary.
For high-risk operations, Password Safe can integrate with ticketing systems and issue credentials only when needed and revoke them immediately after. This removes the problem of long-lived or unused secrets just waiting to be stolen.
Password Safe also provides robust monitoring and auditing. Every time an AI workload uses privileged access, the activity is logged. This is essential for detecting abnormal behavior and for post-incident analysis.
Securing AI as part of a Complete Identity Security Approach
Securing AI is not about stifling innovation and limiting value; it’s about putting the right identity controls in place so you can adopt AI safely and confidently to maximize value.
A key part of scaling agentic AI security is applying the principle of least privilege to AI agents, just as you would for privileged human administrators. Adopting new technology should not mean blindly accepting risks.
BeyondTrust Identity Security Insights gives you the visibility and intelligence to understand what AI agents exist, what they can really do, and how to reduce their standing privileges. Our Password Safe product ensures the secrets behind those agents are protected, rotated, and monitored.
When combined, the result is a secure foundation where AI workloads can operate with least privilege, minimal blast radius, and properly governed access. This maximizes the benefits of AI without increasing the identity attack surface.
Source: BeyondTrust