Okta's AI Agent Push Puts IAM to a Harder Test

An AI agent can use a valid credential, call an approved tool, and still make a change the business never intended. That is the problem I kept coming back to while reading Maria Korolov’s CSO analysis of Okta’s push into AI agent security.The identity argument interests me because agents need access to be useful. An assistant that can investigate a support ticket, retrieve documentation, or change an account has to authenticate somewhere. Someone has to decide which resources it can reach, whose authority it carries, and how that access ends. Identity and access management, or IAM, already handles much of that work for people and software.Extending those controls to agents makes sense. The harder question is how much protection they provide once the agent is authenticated and working inside its permissions.I have written about the controls surrounding an AI workflow before. Okta’s announcements make that discussion more concrete: identity vendors are moving into the path between an…