IBM Introduces Identity and Control for AI Agents, Securing Frontier Intelligence for the Enterprise

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Oct 27, 2026, 00:01 ET

Enterprises are deploying agents faster than they can verify them. HashiCorp Vault uses Agent Identity to give each agent a governed identity
Verified agents still need limits on access. Vault extends its established secrets management to AI agents, built to enforce least-privilege access and enable real-time revocation when an agent attempts an unauthorized action
Enterprises can't scale agents they can't see, test or account for. IBM watsonx Orchestrate is designed to unify discovery, containment, and evaluation across Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Gemini

ATLANTA, Oct. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- At TechXchange 2026, IBM (NYSE: IBM) is announcing new capabilities to help developers, IT and security teams put AI agents to work across business systems with clear authority and accountability. IBM brings together agent discovery, verified identities, access controls and performance evaluation to help organizations understand who owns each agent, control what it can access, and trace its actions across existing applications and infrastructure.

According to Gartner, by 2028 the average Fortune 500 enterprise will use over 150,000 AI agents. But only 13% of organizations believe that they have the right AI agent governance in place [1]. Persistent credentials, unclear ownership and disconnected controls make it harder to govern agents as they interact with other agents, invoke tools and act across teams, platforms and clouds.

"The winners in enterprise AI are changing how their business runs, not simply adding more AI to it," said Dinesh Nirmal, Senior Vice President, IBM Software. "For agents to take on real work across the systems a company depends on, it requires an AI operating model – one that connects agents to the business's data, applications and infrastructure and runs them with the same discipline as its most critical systems. Build trust and control into that model, and agents stop being a technology and become a way of doing business."

Today's announcements extend IBM's portfolio to deliver an AI operating model of four essential systems working together: agents, data, automation and hybrid infrastructure. This starts with the trust and control every agent needs – a verified identity, only the access it needs, and one place to discover, secure and evaluate agents regardless of where they were built.

Extending HashiCorp Vault to AI agents
HashiCorp Vault manages the secrets and credentials that applications and services use to access business systems. It provides that control through centrally managed secrets, automated rotation for supported credentials, and dynamically generated credentials that expire or can be revoked. These capabilities help reduce the time exposed credentials remain usable and limit access to the permissions configured for each role.

HashiCorp Vault already secures non-human identities for organizations including ABN AMRO, Adobe, athenahealth, BBVA, BlackRock, Canva, Duke Energy, Expedia, London Stock Exchange, Starbucks, Swiss Federal Railways and Target, across systems that process billions of dollars in transactions [2]. HashiCorp will now extend those capabilities to AI agents, issuing secured, short-lived credentials that limit each agent to what it needs.

Establishing agent identity and accountability
AI agents are a growing class of non-human identity, alongside applications and services. As they begin acting across business systems, enterprises need a clear record of who owns each agent and what authority it has been granted. HashiCorp is combining governed agent identity with credential controls to help organizations delegate work with defined authority and accountability.

When used with HashiCorp Vault, Agent Identity establishes the authoritative record for each agent, such as who owns it, its lifecycle status and the authority it has been granted. Built to extend existing identity and security investments, it shares relevant identity and authorization context with Vault's credential controls – ultimately enforcing least-privilege access and enabling real-time revocation when an agent attempts an unauthorized action.

Controlling agent credentials and access
Identifying an agent is only the start. Enterprises also need to control the credentials it uses to reach databases, applications and cloud services – and how long those credentials remain valid. As agents invoke tools and act across business systems, their credentials become a critical security boundary. An agent with a long-lived, overprivileged credential can put systems and data at risk if it's compromised or acts outside its intended task. Enterprises need to establish what each agent's job is, limit the access it receives and revoke that access when circumstances change.

These controls extend beyond initial authentication. If an agent attempts to retrieve information or perform actions outside its approved permissions, the access can be denied and session revoked in real time to prevent unauthorized activity. Vault's short-lived credentials and least-privilege controls can further restrict what an agent accesses and the duration of those permissions.

Additional capabilities include:

Vault 2.2 gives agents their own secured accounts, automatically renews their credentials and incorporates post-quantum encryption for quantum-era threats.
Secure Hub (public preview) gives companies centralized visibility across their Vault environments to make it easier to understand operational health, usage and security resources.

At TechXchange, client speakers will share how they use Vault to secure enterprise applications, workloads and AI agents

athenahealth: Automating certificate management with Vault's PKI engine.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Applying IBM Verify and Vault to AI agent identity, just-in-time access, dynamic secrets and auditability.
Optum: Using Vault Radar to detect exposed secrets and Boundary for just-in-time, identity-based access.
Seven-Eleven Japan: Centralizing and encrypting secrets with Vault Enterprise and detecting hardcoded secrets with Vault Radar.
Yum! Brands: Building an identity security platform with IBM Verify, with a look ahead to machine identities and secrets management.

"AI presents extraordinary opportunities to accelerate biomedical research and discovery, but realizing its potential requires a foundation of security, trust, and responsible governance," said Shailesh M. Shenoy, Assistant Dean for Information Technology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "In my experience, technologies such as IBM Verify and HashiCorp Vault can play an important role in helping organizations establish the identity, access, and security controls needed to innovate with confidence."

Managing agents across platforms
Identity tells organizations what an agent is. But they also need to see every agent they have, wherever it was built. IBM watsonx Orchestrate works across the AI ecosystem, not inside a single vendor's platform, to give organizations one place to discover, secure and evaluate their agents. Capabilities include:

Discover (tech preview): Organizations can't govern agents they don't know exist. Orchestrate connects to platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Gemini to find agents built in third-party environments, so teams can see and manage agents instead of adding them manually. This capability also extends to models and MCP servers.
Contain (tech preview): One rogue agent can disrupt others and spread mistakes across the business. Orchestrate now runs agents in isolated sandboxes so a rogue agent can't interfere with others. Teams also now have access to a kill switch to shut down any agent.
Evaluate: Agents that aren't tested and tracked can quietly drift off course and increase costs. Teams using Orchestrate can now test the quality, accuracy and compliance of agents, models and MCP servers before deployment, then monitor them in production. Built-in cost tracking shows each agent's model and token use, so teams can spot what's driving spend and fix it.

Orchestrate also works with Vault's credential controls and Agent Identity to establish what each agent's job is, govern its authority and enforce least-privilege credential access. Together, these controls help organizations authorize and audit agent actions and rapidly revoke trust and credentials when risk changes.

Connecting agents to the business
Once agents are authorized to use a company's APIs and tools, they need to know what already exists, how systems connect, what can be reused safely and what their actions could affect. IBM Integration Intelligence Hub is built to provide that knowledge through its Unified Context Engine, so agents can fix problems like stuck messages or deploy an API using what's already in place. Skills, approval policies and audit controls keep those actions in check. Instead of rebuilding for AI, organizations can put agents to work on the systems they already depend on.

Scaling agents with NVIDIA
Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault integrate with NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime software, the foundation of the NVIDIA OpenShell Architecture. Together, they pair a protected environment for agents to run in with a verified identity and short-lived credentials for every agent, so each action can be traced, limited and reviewed.

"Businesses need enforceable control over how agents operate and what they can access," said John Fanelli, vice president, enterprise software, NVIDIA. "Our work with IBM combines NVIDIA OpenShell's policy-governed runtime with Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault to help enterprises scale AI agents with secure execution, verified identities and tightly scoped access to business systems."

Responding to Emerging Security Threats
When new vulnerabilities are discovered, enterprises must quickly identify affected systems, determine required changes and deploy fixes without disrupting critical operations. In complex environments, this process often involves multiple teams, tools and processes.

IBM Concert integrates observability, optimization, incident management and security across applications, infrastructure and networks. With AI-powered insights and proof of exploitability, Concert helps teams to identify high-risk vulnerabilities, assess operational impact, and coordinate responses. These capabilities also help organizations address performance, manage costs and maintain resilience in hybrid environments.

HashiCorp Terraform provides an infrastructure context and governed workflows for change implementation. New features now generally available and in public preview, including Terraform policy, Terraform Developer Portal and Terraform remote MCP server, enable developers and AI agents to access approved configurations and implement infrastructure changes through established controls. Terraform powered by Infragraph also helps teams understand infrastructure relationships and dependencies for more informed decisions.

Together, these capabilities enable organizations to progress from identifying vulnerabilities to implementing and verifying remediation, while optimizing the visibility and governance essential for enterprise operations.

A comprehensive system intelligence and change orchestration layer for IBM Z
IBM Z Atlas maps a client's entire z/OS stack across infrastructure, middleware, and applications, and then uses that intelligence to address the manual effort of tasks like patch management, regulatory response, and sharing system knowledge across teams, from systems programmers to application developers. Atlas addresses the leading cause of unplanned z/OS outages – changes that aren't proven to be safe – by mapping how a change impacts the z/OS stack and testing and validating it. This design (in tech preview) accelerates clients' modernization efforts by keeping experts in control and giving practitioners, in operations or development, the same shared Z system visibility to reduce risk.

Availability
HashiCorp Vault 2.2, Agent Identity, watsonx Orchestrate evaluate capabilities, IBM Concert, and HashiCorp Terraform policy are generally available. Secure Hub, Terraform Developer Portal, Terraform remote MCP server, and IBM Z Atlas are in public preview. IBM Integration Intelligence Hub and watsonx Orchestrate discover and contain capabilities are in tech preview.

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.

Learn more
IBM TechXchange is IBM's annual conference for developers and technology practitioners and brings together nearly 6,500 attendees from 85 countries. This year, the event incorporates HashiConf to bring together the HashiCorp community with practitioners from across IBM, Red Hat and Confluent. Attendees can choose from more than 1,000 sessions and experiences, including 180 hands-on labs, 260 client-led sessions and more than 50 certification exams. Speakers include American Airlines, Bradesco, Citi, CVS Health, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Hertz, and US Bancorp who will share how they are making AI enterprise ready.

Session livestream and replays will be available here: ibm.biz/txc26-livestream.

Supporting Materials

[1]: Gartner Identifies Six Steps to Manage AI Agent Sprawl
[2]: HashiCorp Vault client stories

About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

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IBM
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SOURCE IBM