# Agent identity architectures: Delegated, bounded, and autonomous

DevFeed: [Agent identity architectures: Delegated, bounded, and autonomous](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/agent-identity-architectures-delegated-bounded-and-autonomous-1895.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://1password.com/blog/ai-agent-identity-architectures>)

Author: info@1password.com (Wen Li)

Published: 2026-06-26T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Blog on 1Password Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/blog-on-1password-blog.md>)

Topics: [AI Bots](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-bots.md>), [CI/CD](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cicd.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agent.md>), [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [autonomous](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/autonomous.md>), [identity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/identity.md>), [identity-and-access-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/identity-and-access-management.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>)

## AI overview

The article outlines delegated, bounded, and autonomous authority models for AI agents, focusing on their differing identity, authorization, and threat-model requirements across local and remote deployments.

## Source excerpt

This is the second post in a series that follows 1Password's response to NIST's call for input on how those principles should apply to agents. In our last post on agent identity, we introduced why the ability to reason makes agents fundamentally different from traditional machine workloads, why it breaks the assumptions traditional identity and access management was built on, and why real-time attestation establishes agent identity at runtime. This post maps those principles to production agent profiles The agents running in your environment aren't all the same and neither are the risks they carry. A CI/CD pipeline runner and a long-running autonomous coding agent have fundamentally different access needs, threat surfaces, and identity requirements. Traditional IAM has been successful at governing login for humans and machine workloads with predictable behavior, but controlling non-deterministic agentic systems require unique authority models that a single identity architecture cannot fully govern. An agent that starts with access to a QA database may determine mid-task that it needs production access to complete its task, and the architecture governing it has to respond in real time without over-provisioning. That sort of dynamic authorization looks different depending on the type of agent that's running, who authorized it, and what it has access to. At 1Password, we've mapped the AI agent architectures we see in production into delegated, bounded, and autonomous authority models, each with variants for local and remote deployments. In this post, we'll explore the distinct threat models and required controls to secure all six profiles at your organization. The three agent authority models The authority model describes who or what the agent is acting on behalf of, and what accountability chain that creates. Delegated authority: The agent acts on behalf of a named human. The human's identity is the delegation subject, and the agent's actions must be traceable back to