Agent IAM
Identity and access management that treats each AI agent as a governed enterprise identity.
category ▸ Agents & Identity
Agent IAM, in plain language.
Agent IAM extends the discipline of human identity and access management to autonomous software. Each agent is given a real identity — an owner, a business purpose, a risk tier, an expiry, and a scoped set of what it is allowed to use — instead of running as an anonymous code path with ambient credentials.
This matters because agents are the new privileged actors in an enterprise: they read data, call tools, and take actions at machine speed. Without governed identity, you cannot answer who is accountable for an agent, what it is entitled to, or whether its access is still warranted.
How Cortex implements it.
This term isn't abstract here — it maps to a real capability in the runtime. Here is exactly how Cortex enforces or relates to it.
In Cortex, every agent identity carries an owner, department, business purpose, risk tier, expiry, allow-lists for models / actions / environments, and a recertification cycle. These are enforced both at credential issuance and at runtime.
At runtime, an expired or suspended identity cannot act (403 AGENT_IDENTITY_EXPIRED), and a model outside the identity's allow-list is rejected (403 MODEL_NOT_ALLOWED). A recertification cadence keeps identities current, surfacing those overdue for review.
Keep building the vocabulary.
These terms sit next to this one in the governed-AI model — follow the thread to see how the controls connect.
RBAC
Role-based access control — permissions granted by role rather than to individuals.
Tenant isolation
Strict separation so one customer's data and agents can never reach another's.
Fail-closed
When a control can't confirm an action is safe, it denies rather than allows.
Risk tier
A classification of how consequential an agent or action is, used to set the controls it needs.
See Agent IAM enforced, not just defined.
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