At last week’s Oktane conference in Las Vegas, Okta unveiled its ambitious vision for transforming the Okta platform into a control plane for AI agents and extending deeper into AI security. The strategy was reflected throughout the event’s keynotes and product announcements, which focused heavily on agent identity, runtime authorization, agent-to-agent interactions, and ecosystem collaboration.
In his opening keynote, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon emphasized that open standards and collaboration are necessary to scale AI, acknowledging that no single vendor can govern and secure the agent ecosystem alone. The announcement of the Blueprint Alliance, a coalition of vendors with expertise in a variety of areas, underscored this point.
Blueprint Alliance is a multivendor, open identity and access management (IAM) for AI agents’ architecture that has agent governance, identity management, authorization, and interoperability components. It intends to coordinate with other vendors on how to build interoperable identity infrastructures. There is also an opportunity for Okta/Auth0 to extend the Blueprint Alliance to customer IAM (CIAM), e-commerce, and loyalty programs in the future. It also highlights that the success of Okta’s strategy ultimately depends on whether the security, and especially the IAM/identity security industry, converges around common standards for agent identity, trust propagation, authorization, and accountability.
Okta is productizing its IAM-for-agent strategies and planning to unify all (human, nonhuman identity [NDI], and agentic) identity management into a single control plane. Okta sees agent authentication and session management being different from human authentication and session management. Dynamic AI agent authorization based on intent and context were center stage in announcements.
Highlights: In collaboration with Anthropic and other vendors, Okta has been actively developing the Cross App Access extension and enterprise-managed access specifications, which are now part of the MCP authorization extensions (issued by Anthropic, based on OAuth 2.1 but not yet part of standards issued by a standards body). Keenly believing in open standards and protocols, Okta has been promoting industry collaboration and coopetition. At Oktane, Okta was also able to bring in panelists from reputable North American financial institutions to describe their IAM for AI agents journey.
Challenges: SPIFFE has started to become the de facto standards for nonhuman identities. Okta still does not have a full SPIFFE agent identity implementation — such as Aembit or Teleport, for example — kand still have not disclosed any plans for any universal know-your-agent (KYA) standards or frameworks (Okta has support for SPIFFE-based authentication on the roadmap for Q4 2026).
Given that the Auth0 (CIAM) and Okta (workforce IAM) stacks have different session management and AI agent management capabilities, not having a unified platform increases the vendor’s product development costs. It also increases enterprises’ costs of building a unified workforce and CIAM infrastructure with equal-strength and interoperable human and nonhuman identities. The vendor’s strategy for using the existing fine-grained authorization solution for AI agents seems unclear. Lastly, Okta’s pricing for IAM for AI agents is still unresolved; instead of monthly active user-based pricing (common with human IAM), it likely will be transaction-based.
Opportunities: Okta may play an important role in developing foundations for intent discovery and authorization decision-making — areas where there are no mature standards today. Building vendor-agnostic reference architectures for human, nonhuman, and agentic AI identity management for clients is likely, and the Blueprint Alliance is a good first step in this direction. Okta is also venturing into the CIEM space with AWS admin identity analysis, complete with access request management. Verifying human-to-agent provider (using OAuth 2.0) and agent provider + agent-to-service provider trust will help overall agent adoption.
Forrester clients interested in discussing IAM for AI agents: Please book an inquiry or guidance session with us.
