By Bob Slocum
Publication Date: 2026-10-26 00:00:00
As AI agents take on more autonomous actions across enterprise systems, organizations need a consistent way to establish the agent’s identity, what authority they have and how their actions are governed. To address this challenge, IBM Agent Identity is now generally available. It helps enterprises treat AI agents as first-class identities and secure them across their lifecycle by bringing registration, delegation, enforcement and governance into a coordinated identity control plane.
The announcement comes as AI agents move from assistance to action. Agents are no longer limited to generating content or answering questions. Increasingly, they retrieve data, invoke tools and APIs, coordinate workflows and act on behalf of people and organizations. That shift creates significant opportunity, but it also introduces an identity challenge that traditional approaches were not designed to solve.
An agent might move across systems, exchange tokens, call another agent or use a…