The developer's guide to AI agent authentication and authorization

AI agents are becoming critical infrastructure in various systems, handling tasks like support triage, deployments, payments, and cross-system coordination, yet they often lack proper security measures. The existing security frameworks, such as OAuth and RBAC, were designed for deterministic software and human users, not for AI agents that generate their own intent and act at runtime. This guide addresses the security challenges posed by AI agents, providing backend, platform, and security engineers the tools to secure agentic systems. It explains how to establish agent identity, authenticate without user sessions, enforce precise authorization, manage delegation chains, and counter new threats like cross-agent privilege escalation and session smuggling. The guide emphasizes treating agents as first-class principals with unique identities and scoped credentials, while also underscoring the importance of fine-grained authorization that considers both agent and user permissions. It critiques common anti-patterns in agent security, like shared service accounts and static API keys, and proposes solutions like dynamic credential issuance and tool-level scoping. The guide concludes with a comprehensive checklist for securing agentic systems, covering identity management, authorization, multi-agent delegation, audit practices, and incident response, while advocating for platforms like WorkOS to streamline these processes.