Identity for AI Agents
An application owner deploying an autonomous AI agent has to answer three questions about every action it takes: who is acting, what are they allowed to do, and on whose authority. ThunderID answers them by giving each agent a managed identity, verifiable credentials, scoped authorization, and a complete audit trail.
Why Agents Need Their Own Identity Class
Enterprise identity was built for two audiences: humans who sign in through a browser, and machines that exchange credentials through an API. Agents fit neither. An agent needs the contextual, session-based access patterns of a human user, but it cannot complete an interactive sign-in. It needs the programmatic reliability of a service account, but it carries far more autonomy and a far broader access scope than any service account was designed for.
Forcing an agent into an existing category creates ungovernable gaps. Registered as a service account, it lacks lifecycle governance, contextual authorization, and individual accountability. Issued a human user's credentials, it destroys auditability: you can no longer tell whether the human or the agent took an action. ThunderID provisions agents as a distinct identity class, with governance built for how agents actually behave.
How Agent Identity Works
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Agent: A first-class identity with its own credentials, assigned permissions, owner, and lifecycle. Identity is bound to the configured agent, not the underlying model, so two agents built on the same model but carrying different prompts, tool grants, and scopes are two distinct identities.
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Owner: The accountable party, a liable human or team, that every action the agent takes traces back to.
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Postures: A single agent occupies three identity postures, sometimes within one task, and each demands a different mechanism:
Posture The agent is... Question it must answer Subject acting on its own behalf "Who is this agent?" Actor acting on behalf of a principal "Who authorized this, and is the agent a permitted delegate?" Resource being invoked by a caller "Who is calling, and are they authorized?"
ThunderID handles authentication and authorization for agents, issues tokens that represent the agent, the user, or both depending on the flow. Services validate those tokens, check scopes, and enforce audience restrictions, and delegated flows preserve actor context so downstream services can audit who initiated each action.
AI Agent Identity and Access Journey
From an application owner's perspective, you need to solve the full agent lifecycle: registering an accountable identity, letting users invoke the agent, and governing every interaction the agent has with models, internal services, external platforms, and other agents. ThunderID provides capabilities for each stage. It governs every interaction, but first it governs the agent itself.
An agent sits at the center of a web of interactions. Invoking parties call it, it reasons over foundation models, it reaches internal services and external systems, and it delegates work to sub-agents.
Parties
Each of these interactions is a distinct identity and access boundary that ThunderID governs, and each maps to a use case below.
Start With Governance
Before an agent handles a single interaction, it has to exist as a governed identity with an accountable owner. Registration, credential rotation, revocation, and ownership transfer are the foundation every other pattern builds on.
- Managed Identity: register an agent as a first-class identity, rotate its credentials, revoke it (and cascade that revocation through its delegation chain), and trace every action back to a liable human.
Being Invoked (Inbound)
These patterns govern who may call an agent and how the agent proves its own identity when it is the one calling.
- Invoking the Agent and Authenticating Users: authenticate the users, applications, and agents that call an agent; enforce step-up for sensitive actions; and manage the structured, time-bound consent that lets an agent act for a user.
- Agent as Subject: let an agent prove its own identity to the systems it accesses with its own credentials (
client_credentials,private_key_jwt, OIDC), distinct from human users and service accounts.
Reaching Out (Outbound)
These patterns govern what an agent may reach once it is running: models, internal tools, and third-party platforms.
- Model Interaction Controls: give an AI gateway a verifiable agent identity so model access, quotas, and guardrails are enforced per agent and, when the agent acts for a user, per delegated user.
- Accessing Internal Business Services: solve the dual-identity problem when an agent calls internal APIs and MCP servers, carrying both the agent and the user in one token and scoping access down to individual tool operations.
- External Integration: let an agent act across third-party SaaS (Gmail, Slack, Salesforce) using short-lived, just-in-time tokens from a managed vault, so the agent never holds a long-lived secret.
Working With Other Agents
- Multi-Agent Interactions: delegate work between agents with tokens that downscope at every hop, preserve the full delegation chain from the originating user to the final actor, and obtain out-of-band approval (CIBA) for headless agents.
Choosing the Pattern You Need
Most agents need more than one of these. A useful way to narrow down is to answer two questions about how the agent is invoked, then read the use cases that apply:
- Is the agent acting on its own, or on behalf of a user? Acting on its own points to Agent as Subject and the autonomous sections of Internal Business Services. Acting for a user points to the delegated sections of Invoking the Agent and Internal Business Services.
- If on behalf of a user, is the user present at the moment of the call? A present user is handled by an interactive consent flow in Invoking the Agent. An absent user is handled by backchannel (CIBA) approval, covered in Multi-Agent Interactions.
Whichever patterns apply, Managed Identity underpins all of them.
Next Steps
Read the use case that fits your agent, then see the patterns running against a working sample in Try It Out.
