Is Your Auth Ready for AI?

As AI agents move from passive chatbots to autonomous actors taking real actions, traditional session-based authentication breaks down. Identity infrastructure must evolve to handle asynchronous agents, delegated authority, non-human identities, and fine-grained authorization. Key requirements include unified identity context across services, policy-based access control instead of hardcoded roles, dynamic relationship-based authorization (FGA), and immutable audit trails linking machine actions to human intent. Practical patterns covered include AI copilots with scoped delegated tokens, background automation agents using non-human identities, and multi-tenant SaaS with strict tenant isolation. The recommended path forward involves centralizing identity as a service, adopting OIDC/OAuth 2.0/FGA standards, and supporting token exchange (RFC 8693) for secure context passing between systems.