AI Agents Are Not Users: Building an Identity Model That Reflects That

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Critical architectural insight into identity for AI agents, highly novel and strategically important.

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Why It Matters

For architects building agent orchestration platforms, this directly challenges the default identity delegation patterns (OAuth, service accounts) that create unacceptable blast radii and audit gaps in production agent workflows.

Key Takeaways

Treat AI agents as distinct identity principals with runtime-scoped authorization and full audit trails, not as human users or backend services.

AI Agents Are Not Users: Building an Identity Model That Reflects That

Summary

The PocketOS incident, where a Cursor agent issued a single GraphQL mutation to wipe a production database in nine seconds, exposes the architectural failure of treating agents as human users or service accounts. Legacy identity models (OAuth delegation, static service accounts) create over-permissioning and large blast radii, lacking the behavioral context to distinguish routine tasks from destructive actions. The proposed solution is a first-class agent identity model that evaluates authorization at runtime against the specific request, rather than baking broad scopes into credentials at provisioning time.

Author

Cameron Pavey