SailPoint Navigate: Enterprises Race to Secure AI Agent Identities at Machine Speed

SailPoint founder and CEO Mark McClain said the real issue is how to secure all these identities. "We need administrative, we need good compliance controls, but the real issue now … is how do you secure all these identities?" McClain said. "It took a very small amount of analysis for our technical team to go, 'We can't do this effectively in quote admin time.' We have to be in the real-time decision-making cycle of, 'Is this agent with its context and its intent doing what we expect?'"

theCUBE Research's Krista Case and co-host Rebecca Knight said during the event that orchestrating human and AI agents demands real context and effective identity, not just big claims. Machine identities have climbed to 109 for every human, they explained in an analysis of the SailPoint keynote, highlighting the need for effective identity that maps access paths so autonomous guardrails can enforce the right policies in real time. SailPoint's Autonomous Identity approach sits between rigid kill switches and unconstrained innovation, and buyers should test vendors on messy, nested access paths rather than clean demos.

McClain also said the old perimeter defense no longer holds, so organizations must know who every user or agent is and whether it is doing what it should. No enterprise agent truly operates on its own, he said, and the link between humans and agents and a real-time understanding of intent are central to stopping inappropriate actions.

Vinh Nguyen, former chief responsible AI officer for the National Security Agency and senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, said enterprises should apply national-security thinking by prioritizing threats, vulnerabilities and consequences rather than chasing infinite risk reduction. AI agents must not inherit the anonymity or privacy rights of humans, he said, and every action needs to be attributable to a human owner or organization from the outset. Kill switches alone are inadequate.

Matt Mills, president of SailPoint, said proofs of concept in customer environments separate real agent security from marketing claims. SailPoint asks prospects to run its software on their own networks, data and use cases, which quickly shows which providers can actually deliver, he said. The Entro acquisition added about 1,200 discovery sources for non-human identities, Mills noted, and the main obstacle to letting AI fix problems on its own is getting auditors and regulators comfortable, not the technology.

At Amazon Web Services, tasks on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore grew 15 times over in the first six months of the year, and a new agent is created every 4.5 seconds, according to Madhu Parthasarathy, general manager of Bedrock AgentCore. Because agents will go to any length to finish a task, he said, policies have to be enforced outside the agent through AgentCore Gateway. SailPoint generates those policies from agent observability data.

Chandra Gnanasambandam, chief technology officer of SailPoint, emphasized that agents most often go rogue when they hit a missing permission midtask and find a way to break in. To stop that, SailPoint is introducing just-in-time authorization, which lets a human owner grant access for a limited time. Its Lineage Map records the full chain from human to agent to tool to data, across clouds and platforms.