Slide 8 of 28
Part 1 — What Is It?Slide 8
Slide 8 · Why Agent Identity Is Different
Human identity systems weren't designed for this. Here's exactly where they break.
Three specific properties of agents that traditional IAM cannot handle.
Traditional user identity
One principal, one session: a person logs in, authenticates, gets a role. Each action is attributable to that person.
Explicit credential hand-off: sharing credentials requires deliberate action — copy, send, type. It's visible. It leaves traces.
Session ends, access ends: log out or timeout clears the session. Credentials don't persist into the next person's session.
One level of delegation: a manager approves a task. The approver's identity doesn't travel with the approved action.
Agent identity
Many principals, blurred attribution: one agent acts for many users across many tasks. Who did a given action? The agent? The user? The operator?
Implicit credential sharing: an agent holds credentials in memory and can invoke them on behalf of any prompt it receives. Sharing is the default, not the exception.
State persists across sessions: agents can retain memory — including credentials — across sessions, users, and contexts unless explicitly cleared.
Recursive delegation: orchestrator delegates to manager, manager to worker, worker to sub-worker. Each hop can expand scope. There's no standard limit.
The gap that attackers exploit

Every one of those right-column properties is an attack vector. Blurred attribution means actions can happen without clear accountability. Implicit credential sharing means access travels without a paper trail. Persistent state means yesterday's admin session can become today's attack. Recursive delegation means privilege can expand invisibly across a chain of agents.

AG03 is what happens when you layer a dynamic, multi-agent system on top of identity infrastructure that was never designed for it.

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