2 posts tagged with "non-human-identity"

The worst place to discover that you shipped an AI agent is in an incident review. Not the design doc, not the architecture review, not the change ticket — the incident review, where a lawyer is asking why a customer's account got a refund nobody authorized, and an engineer is scrolling through a service that was last meaningfully reviewed eleven months ago, and there, forty lines into a function called enrichTicket, is a model call that reads the customer record, decides on a resolution, and calls the billing API. Nobody diagrammed it. Nobody approved it as an agent, because to the person who wrote it, it wasn't one. It was "just a helper."

This is shadow AI, and it has grown teeth. The first wave was employees pasting company data into consumer chatbots — a data-leakage problem, bad but bounded. The second wave is agents: model calls wired into internal tools, reading real data and taking real actions, sitting inside services that were approved for something else entirely. Roughly half of employees admit to using AI tools their employer never sanctioned, and a striking share of that usage comes from the top — directors and executives are among the biggest culprits, not the interns. When the same instinct reaches your codebase, you don't get a leaked spreadsheet. You get an autonomous actor with production credentials that nobody signed off on.

The uncomfortable part is that shadow agents aren't created by reckless people. They're created by good engineers doing exactly what you asked them to do: ship value fast, reuse existing infrastructure, don't file a ticket for every small change. The governance gap isn't a discipline problem. It's a definitional one — your review process doesn't have a category for what they built.

The IAM role you cut for the agent on day one was supposed to be temporary. The pilot needed momentum, the team needed the agent productive by the demo, and somebody — probably you — added a comment in the PR that said "tighten this after we ship." Ninety days later the pilot has shipped, the agent is in production with paying customers behind it, and the role still has write:* on three buckets the agent has never touched. On-call cannot tell you which of the eighteen scopes are load-bearing and which are vestigial, because the only person who knew is on a different team now, and the runtime telemetry that would prove the difference was never wired up.

This is not a story about a careless team. It is a story about how every team building agents arrives at the same place, because the lifecycle discipline that prevents it has not been invented yet at most companies. Human identity has thirty years of accumulated machinery for this — onboarding workflows, quarterly access reviews, automatic revocation when somebody transfers teams. Agent identity has a Slack message that said "I'll clean this up later." The day-one grant becomes the day-ninety inheritance, and the blast radius scales with every model upgrade, every new tool added to the agent's belt, every customer onboarded against the same role.