Guardian Agents: The Next Layer of Identity Governance

Summary: The article describes how AI agents inherit permissions from the human or service identities they act for, carrying OAuth tokens and delegated access scoped for a different context, and operate continuously after a single authentication without an intervening governance checkpoint. It proposes a "guardian agent" - a runtime control layer that inventories agents, baselines their tool calls and data accesses, and enforces least-privilege scoping at execution rather than at login.
What's compelling: An agent acting for a sales director carries that person's accumulated, often overprivileged access across every application the identity can reach, and traditional IAM records the login event and stops - leaving the entire sequence of tool calls and cross-system traversals invisible to the governance layer.

Read the original at The Hacker News ↗