What is an agentic identity?
An agentic identity is a digitally verifiable identity assigned to an artificial agent — a bot, copilot, LLM function, or autonomous system — capable of acting on a delegated basis.
Unlike traditional service accounts or static credentials, agentic identities are:
- Ephemeral: Possibly spun up and destroyed in seconds.
- Delegated: Capable of acting on behalf of a user or another agent.
- Bound to context: Tied to a task, intent, and originator.
This is a fundamental shift from how identity has been handled for humans or even machine identities (what we call “non-human identities” or NHIs). NHIs are often long-lived and managed like infrastructure: think of a backend service with a static key in a key vault. Agentic identities, in contrast, are active actors in a runtime workflow.
