Token Security 2026 AI Agent Identity Security Predictions

AI Agents Are Becoming the Enterprise’s Largest Identity Surface

2026 marks the tipping point where AI agents will significantly outnumber humans in the enterprise and hold exponentially more permissions. With AI agents now making decisions, triggering workflows, touching sensitive data and initiating transactions, the identity attack surface is fundamentally changing.

Token Security co-founders Itamar Apelblat and Ido Shlomo share ten predictions that define how AI-driven identity risk, governance and security will evolve in the year ahead.

5 Predictions from Itamar Apelblat, CEO & Co-Founder, Token Security

1. AI Agents are going to move from non-prod to production 

“Today, most AI Agents are still running in a non-production environment. We've already seen organizations converting workloads to interact with AI, and also connecting their AI Agents into the production environment. To do that on a large scale, they have to manage their permissions and life cycle.”

2. Compliance frameworks will undergo a major overhaul to account for AI Agents in the workforce

“Traditional compliance models were built for human-centric workflows, and they’re already breaking under the realities of AI-driven operations. Over the next year, we’ll see frameworks evolve dramatically to recognize AI agents as active members of the workforce with their own identities, permissions, accountability requirements and control expectations. Any organization that doesn’t update its compliance posture to reflect this shift will find itself out of alignment with regulators and customers alike.”

3. AI agents will become the biggest most privileged identity type in the enterprise

“In 2026, AI agents will significantly outnumber human users in most large organizations and they’ll hold more sensitive permissions. The most severe identity incidents won’t originate from a compromised employee, but from an over-privileged or compromised agent capable of making thousands of harmful decisions per minute.”

4. Every employee will use multiple Agents for their day-to-day job

“Every employee will operate through several AI agents that execute tasks, access systems and make decisions on their behalf, effectively becoming the most privileged identity type in the enterprise. The center of identity risk will shift from the human to the network of agents acting for them, where compromising a single over-privileged agent can cause far more damage than compromising the employee themselves.”

5. The AI agent IAM stack will be rebuilt around a Non-Human Identity (NHI) first design

“Today’s IAM stack was built for people. It can’t keep up with ephemeral AI agents, short-lived tokens and dynamic workflows. The amount of exposed secrets in the organization will increase dramatically because of the usage of local MCP servers.”

5 Predictions from Ido Shlomo, CTO & Co-Founder, Token Security

1. Long-lived credentials will continue to pollute AI agent identity mechanisms

“Despite rapid innovation in agentic AI systems, enterprises will enter 2026 still relying on long-term credentials and static API keys to power critical AI workflows. These legacy mechanisms will quietly undermine AI agent identity integrity, creating brittle trust chains that attackers can exploit far more easily than the agents themselves.”

2. Cleartext service account credentials will reappear on employee endpoints due to poor MCP hygiene

“After years of progress eliminating employee-side secrets with SSO, we’ll see a resurgence of cleartext service account credentials stored locally driven not by humans, but by agents configured with weak MCP hygiene. As agents accumulate tools and permissions, they will inadvertently reintroduce one of the industry’s oldest security problems.”

3. Security incidents will spike due to identity mismatches between employees and AI agents

“As employees rely on agents to consume internal data, a dangerous gap will emerge between what the employee is allowed to access and what the AI agent is configured to retrieve. This mismatch will drive a new class of insider incidents, not from malicious intent, but from over-privileged agents over-reaching, oversharing or misinterpreting access boundaries.”

4. AI coding agents will become a major source of identity misconfigurations

“Coding agents will accelerate development, but they will also generate flawed identity patterns at scale, such as hard-coded credentials, mis-scoped tokens, over-privileged service accounts and incorrect entitlement mappings. These misconfigurations in infrastructure as code (IaC) and DevOps automations will propagate quickly, creating systemic identity debt that teams struggle to unwind.”

5. AI Agent identity–driven breaches will take center stage in 2026

“We are shifting from breaches caused by human identity failures to breaches rooted in AI agent identity compromise. As agents become the operational backbone of the enterprise, attacks targeting their tokens, personas and delegated authority will define the next wave of high-impact incidents.”

Identity Is the Control Plane for the AI Era

Across every prediction, one theme is clear: AI is shifting identity from a security category to the new control plane of the enterprise. Organizations that can understand, govern and secure AI agent identities at scale and in real time will move faster, innovate confidently and stay resilient against emerging threats.

Token Security believes the next decade of cybersecurity will be won by those who master this transformation.

To hear more about how Token Security can help you with Non-Human Identity and AI agent security, talk to us today.

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