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As organizations move from experimenting with agents to operating them at scale, identity becomes a primary challenge. It's easy to create an agent, but more difficult to answer foundational questions such as what this agent can access, who owns it, and how to verify that it operates within policy.
These aren't new challenges. They're the same identity and access management problems that organizations already address for users and applications. Microsoft Entra solves them for agents.
The identity foundation
Identity isn't an add-on to Agent 365. It's the foundation. Organizations don't want a separate system to manage agents. They expect agents to follow the same security posture, controls, and operating model as the rest of the environment.
Microsoft Entra extends the existing identity plane to agents, which allows organizations to manage them using familiar tools and processes. Agent 365 builds directly on Microsoft Entra to assign a clear, manageable identity to each agent so that it can be consistently authenticated, authorized, and monitored across the environment.
At the center of this model is Microsoft Entra Agent ID, which introduces purpose-built agent identity constructs. The agent identity ensures your agents are traceable, authenticated, authorized, and secured, just like any user in your organization. The agent identity blueprint defines the characteristics and permissions of a class of agents. This structure gives administrators scalable governance. A single blueprint can enforce consistent security policies, credentials, and access boundaries across dozens or hundreds of agent instances, without managing each one individually.
From identity to accountability
The agent identity becomes the control point for everything the agent does. With Microsoft Entra, organizations can enforce least-privilege access by issuing scoped, time-bound tokens so that agents access only the resources they need. Conditional Access and Identity Protection policies apply to agents just as they do to users, so administrators can enforce the same risk-based controls across the environment.
Administrators can assign permissions, manage lifecycle policies, and monitor agent behavior. Identity governance constructs like access packages and entitlement management extend to agents, enabling organizations to onboard, manage, and retire agents with the same rigor as employees. Every agent has clear ownership, accountability, and compliance.
Because agent identities are anchored in Microsoft Entra Agent ID, their identity and metadata flow consistently into the broader Microsoft security ecosystem of monitoring, audit, and compliance tools, so organizations can understand not just what agents exist, but how they’re behaving and whether they’re operating within policy.
Agent types
Agent identity requirements vary based on how agents operate. Some agents act on behalf of a user, so their access is evaluated in that user's context. Other agents operate independently and require their own identity and governance model.
Microsoft Entra supports both patterns through Entra Agent ID. Interactive agents acquire tokens that carry both user and agent context. Autonomous agents authenticate independently using their blueprint's credentials. In both cases, Agent 365 standardizes how these identities are created and managed so that agents become well-defined participants in the identity system rather than unmanaged or unknown actors.
A platform for builders
For developers building agents, the Microsoft agent identity platform provides the APIs, SDKs, and protocols needed to integrate Agent ID into their applications. Use the same developer ecosystem you already know from the Microsoft identity platform to register agent identity blueprints, provision agent identities, and acquire tokens through Microsoft Graph. This approach ensures that agents are secure by design from the first line of code, not retrofitted after deployment.