AI Agents and the Identity Crisis of 2026

Yes, and no. The full episode and all five Signals are free to watch on this page with no form. The form only unlocks the deck and attendee playbook, so we know who to send Episode 02 to.

The 36 slides from the session as a PDF, and the attendee playbook: the five-question assessment, CLI commands for AWS, Azure and GCP, the logs to switch on first, the 14/30-day ownership rule, detection ideas, a 90-day plan, and regulator Q&A covering RBI, SEBI and CERT-In.

Yes. We ran out of time, so we are answering the remaining questions by email, one by one. If you have a new one, add it in the kit form and it goes to Vikram and Lalit.

No. About twelve of the seventy-one minutes show how Cy5’s ion platform does the measurement, and that part is labelled in the chapters. Everything else, including the commands, works with native cloud tools and a spreadsheet.

It is being planned now. Everyone who downloads the kit hears the topic and date first.

The Inherited Perimeter is the set of cloud entitlements an AI agent or automated workload acquires by assuming an identity that already exists — an execution role, service account, pipeline trust or access key. It is measured by the Permission Delta: the share of granted permissions that identity has not invoked in ninety days.

The proportion of permissions granted to a non-human identity that it has not invoked during a defined observation window, typically ninety days. A delta of 0.94 means the identity used six percent of what it was given. It is the core metric of the Inherited Perimeter framework.

In production, an AI agent almost never receives a purpose-built identity. It authenticates as its runtime: an AWS Lambda execution role, a Kubernetes pod service account, a CI/CD job's OIDC trust relationship, or a static access key in an environment variable. It inherits every permission that identity already holds.

In AWS, removing a role's permissions or a user's keys does not invalidate STS session credentials already issued; they stay valid until they expire. An explicit deny conditioned on the token issue time stops them now, which is what “Revoke active sessions” attaches. Lalit covers this at 35:28.

Start by enumerating per provider: IAM roles, users and access keys in AWS; service principals and managed identities in Entra; service accounts in Google Cloud. Then add workload identities from Kubernetes and any CI/CD trust relationships. Attribution — who owns each one — is usually harder than enumeration.

No. CIEM is the tooling category that measures cloud entitlements. The Inherited Perimeter is a framework for interpreting that measurement once AI agents begin assuming existing identities, together with a five-question assessment for locating an estate's current visibility. It can be applied with any CIEM tool, or with native cloud APIs alone.

They address different stages. The CSA framework designs governance for purpose-built agent identities — lifecycle, just-in-time access, constrained delegation. The Inherited Perimeter measures what agents inherit in estates that have not reached that state yet, which is most of them. The two are complementary: assessment first, governance design second.

Yes, and arguably more so. The non-human identities an agent will inherit already exist — service accounts, pipeline roles, access keys, cross-account trusts. Measuring the gap between what they were granted and what they use is more useful before agents are deployed against them than after.