What Is a Non-Human Identity?
A plain-English definition of non-human identity (NHI): the service accounts, API keys, tokens, and AI agents that authenticate and act in your systems without a person at the keyboard.
A non-human identity, often shortened to NHI, is any actor that authenticates and acts in your systems without a person at the keyboard: a service account, an API key, an OAuth token, a bot, or an AI agent. NHIs do real work and hold real access, but they were created for software rather than people, which makes them behave very differently from the human accounts most security processes were built around.
What counts as a non-human identity
Every system has two kinds of users. Human identities belong to people who sign in. Non-human identities belong to software: the automated account that runs a nightly job, the API key a tool uses to call a service, the token an integration stores to stay connected, and now the AI agent that reads data and takes actions on its own. AI agents are the newest and fastest-growing kind of non-human identity.
What unites them is that they act without a person in the loop. They authenticate on their own schedule, they can run around the clock, and they hold credentials that grant access to data and actions. An AI agent connected to email, a drive, and a calendar is, from the system's point of view, just another non-human identity holding a set of keys.
Why non-human identities are harder to govern
The access controls in most companies were designed for a slowly growing list of human identities that you could review every few months. Non-human identities break that assumption. They differ from human accounts in ways that matter for security.
AI agents make this harder still, because a single workflow can create new tokens and service accounts quickly, and because an agent follows instructions, including instructions an attacker hides in the content it reads. That is why OWASP highlights Identity and Privilege Abuse, the misuse of an agent's credentials or the blurring of an agent's identity with a user's, as a top risk for agentic applications.
- They skip the human checks: a non-human identity does not pass through multi-factor login the way a person does.
- They have no natural lifecycle: they do not resign, get offboarded, or expire on their own.
- They have no normal behavior: there is no human pattern to compare against when something looks off.
How to bring non-human identities under control
The goal is to treat each non-human identity the way you treat a person: give it its own distinct credential, scope that credential to only what its job needs, tie it back to a real owner, log what it does, and be able to switch it off in one step. For AI agents specifically, that means each agent gets its own scoped identity rather than borrowing a human's login or sharing a single key across many agents.
OWASP recommends exactly this: unique, scoped, and ideally short-lived identities for each agent, kept separate from the user's identity, plus continuous logging of privileged actions. Enforcing that at the boundary between agents and your systems is what turns a sprawling, unmanaged set of non-human identities into a governed one.
- A non-human identity (NHI) is any service account, key, token, or AI agent that acts without a person.
- NHIs skip human login checks, have no natural lifecycle, and have no normal behavior to compare against.
- AI agents are the fastest-growing kind of NHI, and they act on the content they read.
- Governing them means a distinct, scoped identity per agent, tied to an owner, logged, and revocable.
Frequently asked questions
Is an AI agent a non-human identity?
Yes. From a system's point of view, an AI agent that authenticates and acts on its own is a non-human identity, like a service account or an API key. It is simply the newest and fastest-growing kind, and one that acts on the content it reads rather than on a fixed script.
Why are non-human identities a bigger problem than human accounts?
Non-human identities skip the login checks people go through, run around the clock with no normal pattern to compare against, and have no natural end of life, so they persist until someone removes them. The controls built for a reviewable list of human accounts do not keep up with software identities that multiply quickly.
How do you secure an AI agent's identity?
Give the agent its own distinct, scoped credential rather than a borrowed human token or a shared key, tie that credential to a real owner, scope it to only what the agent's task needs, log every action it takes, and be able to revoke it in one step. OWASP recommends unique, scoped, and ideally short-lived identities for each agent.
What is Identity and Privilege Abuse in OWASP's agentic risks?
It is the risk that an agent's credential is stolen or misused, that an agent escalates its own privileges, or that an agent's identity gets blurred with the user's. OWASP names it as a top risk for agentic applications, which is why each agent needs its own clearly separated, scoped identity.
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