Okta made a nightmare micromanager for your AI agents

Summary

Identity access and management platform Okta announced the general availability of its Okta for AI Agents, which will give customers the ability to do three things: locate agents, see what they’re doing, and shut them down if need be. “This technology wave has tremendous potential, but we have to make sure we put the right controls and foundational groundwork in place to make it secure as well,” Okta CEO Todd McKinnon said in a video presentation Monday announcing the release. Over the last 17 years, McKinnon said, Okta’s bet on identity access has paid off, whether it was in securing users in the cloud, during the wave of mobile adoption at work, as work shifted remote during the pandemic, or now at the outset of agentic AI. “We know what problems you have and what solutions that we need to build for you. They all center around three really important questions: the first one sounds simple, what agents do I have? What can they connect to? What can they do?” McKinnon said. “Some vendors propose to answer some of these questions. Some vendors say they have everything covered. It’s quite daunting.” McKinnon said the challenge of managing agents prompted Okta to build a reference architecture for securing the agentic enterprise – and a product to answer all three questions. During the presentation, Okta demonstrated importing AI agents and their attached metadata from Salesforce, ServiceNow, Google, and AWS, with one click. From the same dashboard, Okta’s agent discovery tool lets users find unmanaged agents and assign them owners and governing policies. The tool runs continuously in the background to help admins take inventory of agents. Through a governance dashboard, admins can see and control what agents have access to down to the scope of the work, and at the tool-level, Duffy said. “What if an agent goes rogue?” Duffy said. “You need a kill switch. With Okta for AI Agents you can trigger a universal log out if an agent starts accessing things it shouldn’t. It's au...