Ping Identity has announced Identity for AI, a solution aimed at turning identity into the trust fabric for the era of AI agents. The proposal seeks to close the “AI trust gap” in companies already deploying assistants, agents, and copilots with operational autonomy, offering visibility, access control, governance, and human oversight from a unified control plane.
Ping’s thesis is clear: in the agent economy, each agent is an identity with permissions, context, and responsibilities. If these agents interact with sensitive data, critical applications, and third parties, identity and access management (IAM) ceases to be peripheral and becomes the central accountability mechanism: who did what, when, with what authorization, and under which security policies.
What is “Identity for AI” (and what problems does it address)
The solution revolves around five pillars that cover the complete lifecycle of the agent:
- Visibility: discover deployed agents and the relationships they establish with users, apps, and data.
- Onboarding and management: register agents, assign profiles, credentials, permissions, and lifecycle management comparable to human users and workloads.
- Authentication and authorization: enforce least privilege, delegation, and dynamic access policies for each interaction.
- Human oversight: keep people in the loop for sensitive decisions with traceability and explicit consent.
- Threat protection: detect and mitigate unknown or malicious agents, impersonations, and abuse patterns.
The goal is for security and business teams to deploy agents with confidence, both for agent-based commerce channels (autonomous interactions with customers and partners) and for autonomous workforce (agents executing internal tasks with corporate systems), minimizing operational risks and data exposure.
Key innovations of the first version (GA planned for early 2026)
- Intelligent Access Control for Agents: extends Ping’s access control capabilities to personal and corporate agents, ensuring every action is authenticated, authorized, and audited.
- Agent Registration and Management: centralized onboarding and management of agents to establish a inventory, policies, and trust from the outset.
- MCP Gateway: an intermediate security layer that monitors activity, enforces policy-based guards, and injects ephemeral “just-in-time” credentials to reinforce least privilege. It integrates DLP and session recording for real-time visibility and auditing.
- Secretless Agent Identity: supports dynamic and ephemeral tokens with zero-knowledge credential insertion, plus integration with third-party secret vaults.
- Human Delegation and Oversight: controls for approval, review, and consent for critical actions, with clear accountability.
- Agent Detection and Defense: capabilities to identify and block unknown or rogue agents within the corporate environment.
Ping indicated that throughout 2026, they will expand functionalities around visibility, governance, privilege management, and protection.
Why is this relevant for enterprise architecture
1) Scale of non-human identities. Organizations already manage people, devices, service accounts, and workloads. Agents introduce a new identity subject that can act autonomously. Managing them as first-class citizens in IAM reduces shadow IT and simplifies audits.
2) Closing the gap between AI and compliance. Observability (recording, DLP, policy enforcement) and ephemeral permissions enable answering what the agent did and under what conditions, meeting regulatory and CISO requirements.
3) Fewer static secrets, more one-time credentials. Ephemeral tokens and secretless insertion reduce the risk of leaks and lateral movement associated with long-lasting credentials.
4) Cross-cutting governance. A single control plane facilitates least privilege practices, separation of duties, controlled delegation, and immediate revocation for agents, avoiding ad hoc configurations per team or tool.
Use cases that benefit
- Support and sales agents who access/update CRMs, generate quotes, open tickets, or process returns with contextual access control and human approval for sensitive operations.
- Internal agents orchestrating tasks across ERP, ITSM, and data lakes with ephemeral tokens injected via the gateway, avoiding key exposure.
- Procurement/Finance agents interacting with third parties and external portals, with DLP and session recording for later investigations.
- Detection of unauthorized agents in shadow IT, with quarantine and defense policies.
What should CTOs and CISOs prepare now
- Agent inventory (including pilots) and current permission mapping.
- Least privilege policies for agents, with human delegation by action types.
- “Secretless” strategy: ephemeral tokens, aggressive rotation, and integration with vaults.
- Telemetry and auditing: define what to log, where, and how long to keep it.
- Agent onboarding/offboarding processes and playbooks for incidents (suspensions, revocations, rollback).
Timeline
Identity for AI is scheduled for GA availability in early 2026. The initial release will include the described capabilities and will be expanded with additional modules throughout the year.
FAQs
How does it differ from traditional IAM?
It applies IAM and PAM principles to non-human identities with AI context, adding observability, real-time guards, and ephemeral credentials for automated decisions.
How does it prevent data leaks by agents?
Through DLP and session recording in the MCP Gateway, along with policy restrictions on what data agents can view or transfer during interactions.
What does “secretless” mean practically?
Agents do not store long-term secrets. The gateway injects dynamic tokens with short validity and limited scope, integrated with corporate vaults.
Can a human stay “in the loop”?
Yes. Sensitive actions by agents can require human approval, with traceability of who authorized and why.
via: Ping identity