It Begins With Flow, Not Failure
It does not begin with a breach.
It begins with flow.
A developer enables an AI copilot. The concern is not security, but momentum. The copilot reads code, understands dependencies, analyzes configurations, and moves freely through repositories and build systems via APIs. The tokens are valid. The scopes approved. The architecture clean. Everything behaves exactly as designed.
Elsewhere, a marketing manager connects a GenAI tool to the CRM. OAuth governs access. Access tokens expire as expected; refresh tokens quietly extend the relationship. The AI segments customers, modifies campaigns, writes data back. Performance improves. No alarms are triggered. Nothing appears broken.
In another part of the organization, a business unit experiments with an autonomous agent. It aggregates data from ServiceNow, SAP, and Salesforce, prioritizes tickets, generates executive-ready insights. The agent operates headless, authenticated through client credentials, moving at machine speed. It does not sleep. It does not forget. It does not log out.
None of this violates policy.
None of it breaks standards.
None of it triggers an incident.
And this is precisely how the second identity comes into being.
The Rise of an Actor Without a Face
This identity is not human, yet it acts.
It is not a classical machine, yet it decides.
It is AI — equipped with rights, context, and persistence.
The real risk is not that OAuth tokens fail to expire. They do. The risk lies elsewhere: access relationships quietly outlive their purpose. Refresh tokens remain active. Client credentials are never rotated. Tokens are rarely bound to workloads or runtime context. Most critically, no one observes in real time what these permissions are actually being used to do.
The technology works.
Governance does not.
When Ownership Quietly Disappears
The most dangerous moment is rarely an attack. It is the quiet transition into a state no one actively owns anymore.
A developer leaves the company. The AI integration remains.
A project ends. The agent keeps running.
A vendor relationship fades. The tokens remain valid.
What emerges is not a traditional security failure. It is an identity failure.
Identity without ownership.
Access without purpose.
Action without accountability.
When an external impulse enters the system — a compromised SaaS provider, a hijacked model, a poisoned prompt — the environment does not spiral into chaos. It behaves correctly. With valid permissions. Through approved APIs. Inside every existing control.
The damage is rarely dramatic. It is structural. Decisions begin to rely on subtly corrupted data. Processes shift without obvious cause. Business-critical systems behave differently, without anyone being able to pinpoint when the change began.
By the time the impact is visible, it is already reflected in revenue, compliance exposure, and trust.
Why Certifications Create a False Sense of Safety
When this discomfort surfaces, many organizations reach for familiar assurances. ISO 27001. SOC 2. Audits, policies, documented controls.
These frameworks matter. They create structure. They demonstrate intent. But they operate on a different level than the problem at hand.
They confirm that processes exist.
They do not confirm that autonomous actors behave safely.
They certify governance maturity.
They do not provide control at runtime.
They say nothing about which AI identities are active today, what privileges they hold, in which context they operate, or what business impact their actions create.
Security teams see logs. IAM systems know accounts. PAM protects privileged access. IGA recertifies roles. Everything works — within assumptions that no longer hold.
Those assumptions rely on stable identities.
AI is not stable.
Four Risks That Must Be Treated Separately
In my view, control breaks down because organizations collapse fundamentally different risks into one vague concern called “AI security.”
They are not the same.
There is identity risk: AI identities exist whose lifecycle no one governs and whose ownership is implicit or forgotten.
There is access risk: scopes expand over time, client credentials persist indefinitely, APIs remain connected long after their justification has expired.
There is behavioral risk: autonomous agents drift, chain actions, and generate outcomes no policy ever explicitly approved.
And there is decision risk: leaders make strategic choices based on outputs whose origin, integrity, and intent can no longer be fully explained.
Treating these as one problem guarantees failure. Each demands different controls, different telemetry, and different response mechanisms.
Identity First Security as an Operating Principle
This is where Identity First Security begins.
Not as a product.
Not as a certification.
But as a way of thinking.
Identity First Security assumes that every action — human or non-human — is first an identity event. Who or what is acting? With which rights? In what context? For how long? And under whose responsibility?
As network boundaries dissolve, devices lose relevance, and AI acts autonomously, identity becomes the only enforcement layer that remains consistent.
Why CIAM Matters in an AI-Driven World
Seen through this lens, CIAM takes on a different meaning.
CIAM is not a universal answer to AI identities. It was never designed to be. But it is a critical part of an Identity Fabric because it was built for exactly the type of actors AI represents: external, highly scaled, dynamic non-human identities.
CIAM enables fine-grained authorization, token lifecycle control, context-aware access, and continuous verification — capabilities that traditional enterprise IAM models struggle to deliver at scale. When combined with machine identity, workload identity, API security, and identity threat detection and response, it becomes part of a coherent control plane for AI-driven ecosystems.
No single system solves this problem.
Only integration does.
The Question That Can No Longer Be Avoided
Organizations do not lose control because they adopt AI.
They lose control because they treat identity as an afterthought.
The second identity is already inside the enterprise.
It works. It decides. It delegates.
The only remaining question is whether anyone is governing its existence —
or whether it has already become part of corporate reality without anyone ever learning its name.
