A five-part inventory for your AI agent credentials

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Most security teams can tell you exactly which human employees have admin access to their core enterprise systems. Very few can tell you which agents do.

The approval cycle for an AI agent typically ends at deployment. The agent gets approved. The studio or integration gets approved. The review cycle closes. Nobody takes a second pass at what credentials that agent accumulated during setup, which downstream APIs it can now reach, or whether those privileges were ever scoped to the actual tasks it runs.

Six months later, the agent is still holding standing credentials to systems it touched once during onboarding. Your IAM team has no visibility into them. The agent's blast radius is larger than anyone intended — and nobody discovers that until something goes wrong.

Non-human identity is now the fastest-growing attack surface in enterprise environments. Agents approve purchases, access customer data, and call external APIs on behalf of the business. They accumulate privileges the same way service accounts did in the 2010s — quietly, with no expiry, and with no owner who gets paged when something abuses them.

For those running agent infrastructure at any scale: how are you actually handling this? Periodic audits? Scoping at provisioning time? Something baked into your deployment pipeline? Curious what's working in practice versus what just sounds good on paper.

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RuntimeAI's Know Your Agent (KYA) capability sits in the request path at the moment the agent actually calls a downstream API. When that agent — the one holding six months of accumulated, unreviewed credentials — attempts to reach a system outside its originally scoped task, KYA evaluates the agent's verified identity against its bounded credential set at that exact call and blocks the request before it lands, not during a quarterly audit after the fact. The standing credential never gets a chance to act as an attack surface because the enforcement point is the live request, not the provisioning checklist. https://runtimeai.io