OpenID Foundation's whitepaper on Identity Management for Agentic AI

One thing you shouldn’t miss this week: The OpenID Foundation’s October 2025 whitepaper on Identity Management for Agentic AI. It’s one of the first serious attempts to define how authentication, authorization, and identity should evolve for autonomous agents. Some key takeaways from the paper: 1. Dynamic Client Registration introduces a critical security flaw. — It creates large numbers of anonymous clients with no link to a real developer or accountable party. 2. Agent identity must include metadata. — Identity should be enriched with attributes such as model, version, and capabilities to enable risk-based access control. 3. Agents should use true “on-behalf-of” flows. — Access tokens must contain distinct identities for both the user and the agent to preserve accountability. 4. Recursive delegation requires scope attenuation. — Each step in a delegation chain must progressively and verifiably narrow permissions. 5. Revocation and de-provisioning are foundational for safety. — Revocation must propagate through the ecosystem; de-provisioning permanently removes an agent’s identity and entitlements. 6. Asynchronous authorization is necessary. — Client-Initiated Backchannel Authentication (CIBA) supports delayed, out-of-band human approval for agent operations. 7. Auditability depends on dual-principal records. — Logs must capture both the human principal and the agent actor using claims such as act in JWTs. 8. Browser and computer-use agents bypass traditional authorization. — These agents operate at the presentation layer, requiring new authentication mechanisms like Web Bot Auth. 9. Policy-as-code enables scalable consent. — Users define high-level intent policies that set operational boundaries for agents instead of approving each action. 10. IAM functions as a safety system. — In cyber-physical contexts, authorization policies define the agent’s safe operational envelope and enforce human oversight.

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