AI Vocabulary · 05 Agents

What is Agent Identity?

An agent's own digital ID, with an owner, limited rights and a log, so you can see which agent did what on whose behalf.

Intermediate

Agent identity means treating an agent like a new member of staff: it gets its own account, a responsible person, only the access rights it needs and a log of its actions. It acts on behalf of a specific user with tokens bound to that user, never with an administrator's master key.

Standards are still in progress. Microsoft Entra Agent ID is a product that gives agents their own identities and access rules; in the US, NIST researches agent identity and authorisation in its AI Agent Standards Initiative; MCP has agent identity on its roadmap, and A2A allows signed Agent Cards. Singapore's framework for agentic AI asks that an agent's rights never exceed those of the person who authorised it.

Why it matters for you

Without its own identity, an agent's actions show up in the logs under someone else's name. Then nobody can tell what the agent did, and switching it off means locking out a person. Agents without an owner pile up as shadow AI.

Own it

Keep a simple register: every agent, its owner, its permissions, its tools and its log. Review it like user accounts, and remove agents nobody needs any more.

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