An AI agent isn't a user. So why are we giving it user credentials?

Reddit r/AI_Agents News
ai-agents access-control identity-management credential-delegation security enterprise-ai best-practices

Summary

The article questions the practice of granting AI agents user credentials and proposes a more granular identity system to enhance security and accountability in production environments.

I have been thinking about this while observing how agents are granted access to services such as GitHub, Jira, Slack, databases MCP tools and others. The straightforward pattern appears to be: User → Agent → Tools Thus, the agent simply inherits the permissions that belong to the user. However, what occurs when the agent: continues to run after the user has departed operates on a schedule delegates tasks to another agent performs more than fifty actions in response to a single request At that point I am not certain that user identity alone is sufficient. Would it be more logical to have: User ID + Agent ID + Task/Session ID so that we can answer questions such as: Who initiated this? Which agent actually performed the action? What authority was assigned to it? Can I revoke that agent without revoking the users permissions? I have been reviewing approaches, such as Lyzr's Control Plane, SailPoint's Agentic Fabric, Fiddler and several vendor-native stacks all of which appear to address different aspects of the problem. I am curious, about what people're doing in production: Do your agents possess their own identities or do you rely mainly on delegated user credentials?
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