# NIST and AI agents: 1Password's approach to agent identity

DevFeed: [NIST and AI agents: 1Password's approach to agent identity](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/nist-and-ai-agents-1password-s-approach-to-agent-identity-1893.md>)

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

Author: info@1password.com (Jacob DePriest; Nancy Wang; Jeff Malnick)

Published: 2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

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

Topics: [AI Agent](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-agent.md>), [Authorization](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/authorization.md>), [Authentication](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/authentication.md>), [Zero Trust](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/zero-trust.md>), [Security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [identity and access management](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/identity-and-access-management.md>), [interoperability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/interoperability.md>), [IAM](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/iam.md>), [Deployment](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/deployment.md>), [Architecture & Design](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/architecture-design.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agents.md>), [authentication](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/authentication.md>), [deployment](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/deployment.md>), [iam](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/iam.md>), [identity-and-access-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/identity-and-access-management.md>), [interoperability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/interoperability.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>), [zero-trust](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/zero-trust.md>)

## AI overview

This article presents 1Password's approach to agent identity for AI agents. It describes identity as a set of challenges involving identification, attestation, enrollment, authentication, and authorization, with an emphasis on interoperability, continuous access decisions, and Zero Trust for reasoning workloads.

## Source excerpt

NIST published a concept paper stating, "Organizations need to understand how identity principles such as identification, authentication, and authorization can apply to agents to provide appropriate protections while enabling business value." This post, and the series that follows, is 1Password's response to NIST's call for input on how those principles should apply to agents. At 1Password, we approach security through simplicity. We are developing an agent identity architecture to simplify and enhance the security of AI agents, ensuring interoperability with existing systems. Our approach is built in collaboration with customers, partners, and the standards community. As part of this work, we recently responded to NIST's AI agent authorization paper. Our view is that agent identity is not a single problem. It is a set of challenges spanning identification, attestation, enrollment, authentication, and authorization for machine workloads with reasoning capabilities. The ability to reason is what sets AI agents apart from traditional machine workloads. This post is the first in a multi-part series on why agent-driven systems require us to rethink identity to enable continuous authentication and authorization for reasoning agents, and how that shapes both our response to NIST and our own approach to agent identity. The agent identity problem Where traditional machine workloads have a "set and forget" policy, the nature of reasoning workloads means a static policy can become out of date as the agent interprets and takes its next action. Agents that automatically deploy software are a great example of this escalation chain. A deployment agent begins with access to QA resources, but its access needs evolve when tests pass and may then require access to production services. The principle of Zero Trust maintains that you should provide only the minimum access needed, but infinitely evolving logic makes it difficult to apply the correct access for the lifetime of an agent pr