# Before you ask what an AI agent can do, ask who it is

DevFeed: [Before you ask what an AI agent can do, ask who it is](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/before-you-ask-what-an-ai-agent-can-do-ask-who-it-is-88528.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.cio.com/article/4236013/before-you-ask-what-an-ai-agent-can-do-ask-who-it-is.html>)

Author: Alexander Garcia-Tobar

Published: 2026-10-16T09:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [CIO](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/cio.md>)

Topics: [Zero Trust](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/zero-trust.md>), [AI software supply chain security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-software-supply-chain-security.md>), [Security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security.md>), [Single sign-on (SSO)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sso.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>)

Tags: [access-control](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/access-control.md>), [access-control-artificial-intelligence-data-governance-data-management-identity-and-access-manag](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/access-control-artificial-intelligence-data-governance-data-management-identity-and-access-manag.md>), [ai-agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agent.md>), [ai-agent-security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agent-security.md>), [artificial-intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/artificial-intelligence.md>), [authentication](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/authentication.md>), [contributor](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/contributor.md>), [data-governance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data-governance.md>), [data-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data-management.md>), [edition-us](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/edition-us.md>), [identity-and-access-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/identity-and-access-management.md>), [language-en](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/language-en.md>), [permissions](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/permissions.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>), [storytype-opinion](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/storytype-opinion.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that organizations should authenticate AI agents' identities and verify their provenance before granting access, using a zero-trust model. It compares agent identity checks to email authentication with DMARC and distinguishes identity verification from later decisions about permissions and content trust.

## Source excerpt

Companies routinely rely on authenticating the identities of humans who access sensitive company data across their networks. There's an established and accepted set of protocols, done upfront and in a zero-trust approach - either we know who you are and let you in, or you're locked out. The same framework needs to be applied to AI agents, posthaste. Companies are increasingly using AI agents developed in-house, or by their vendors, partners, or clients, or, unfortunately, criminals. This can quickly add up to thousands of agents across their infrastructure and supply chains. Non-human identities outnumber human ones 45 to 1 on average in the enterprise and 144 to 1 in cloud-native environments, an increase of 44% in one year, per a recent report. The scale and speed of this growth are beyond the ability to manually track these agents. And they have limited ability to authenticate these agents' identities. The risks are growing. Without proper authentication, untrusted agents could access sensitive financial or customer data and share it, purposely or not, with an outside vendor, and thereby expose both the customer and the company to serious legal and compliance risk. Many companies and security professionals are focusing on what AI agents are allowed to do in terms of permissions. But before doing that, there's a more fundamental question they need to ask each agent: Whose agent is this? And do I trust the owner/creator? About 68% of security professionals can't tell legitimate AI agents from malicious actors. And that question isn't addressed at the growing scale that AI is reaching. Email solved identity In email, we have seen a similar story. Emails faced challenges identifying whether a sender was really who they said they were. Due to how it originated, email had no built-in authentication framework. This led to 89% of all phishing attacks having one common denominator: the sender was lying about who they were. To address this, in 2015 my cofounder and I launc