What is Enterprise-Managed Authorization (EMA)?

Enterprise-Managed Authorization (EMA) is an emerging OAuth-based approach designed to give organizations centralized control over AI agents’ access to workplace applications, addressing the proliferation of employee-approved OAuth grants that can be difficult for IT teams to monitor or revoke. Rather than having each employee approve an agent connection through an app’s consent screen, EMA allows an identity provider to apply existing group and role policies, issuing a short-lived Identity Assertion JWT Authorization Grant (ID-JAG) that an agent exchanges for a conventional app access token. EMA is also called Cross App Access by Okta, while ID-JAG refers specifically to the underlying token format. As of October 2026, Okta and Claude provide the most complete available implementation, with support for selected agents and applications, while WorkOS has added support for MCP servers. The model can simplify onboarding, role changes, offboarding, and visibility into agent permissions, but organizations still need to manage token lifetimes and unsupported connections. Its adoption remains limited by narrow identity-provider compatibility, incomplete application support, draft-stage standards, and the fact that it governs access scopes rather than approval of individual high-risk actions.

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