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This week, Okta unveiled its big new feature: “identity for agents.” At Oktane they positioned their announcement as a landmark moment for AI.  But here’s the twist — in the very same week, Autonomy launched a platform-as-a-service where secure agent identity isn’t an add-on: Agent identity is built into the core.  Okta is offering the means. Autonomy delivers the ends. And in doing so, Autonomy made Okta’s big reveal feel instantly outdated.

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Okta’s Announcement at Oktane

At Oktane 2025, Okta introduced a set of capabilities to extend its human identity fabric to non-human entities, “AI agents.”It’s an effort to bring agents into the same governance frameworks that already exist for human’s interaction with apps. Okta even rolled out a new protocol, Cross App Access, to help agents interact with applications more securely. For companies stuck today with messy service accounts, complex JWTs, and fragile API keys, this is a welcome improvement. But here’s the catch. Okta still treats identity for agents as something you must bolt on and wire up yourself. Developers will need to stitch together keys, credentials, authorizations, rotations, and revocations themselves. Okta gave us a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole picture.

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Autonomy also launched this week

Autonomy went live this week with a very different philosophy. Its platform is designed from the ground up for shipping distributed AI agents at scale identity is inseparable from its platform. When you spin up an agent in Autonomy, it is initialized with  a cryptographic identity. Secure communication channels are established automatically based on attribute based access control (ABAC) policies. Authentication, encryption, and authorization policies are enforced by default. Autonomy is still OAUTH compatible so existing applications are plug-and-play. There is no room for a developer to “forget” to secure an agent — it simply can’t be done wrong. That’s the key distinction. Okta hands you a sophisticated tool for delegating human access. Autonomy makes identity inseparable from the agent itself enabling time-limited granular access control that is designed for autonomous agents. Security doesn’t come later; it’s batteries included.

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Means Versus Ends

The contrast couldn’t be sharper. Okta gives enterprises a way to bring agents into their existing identity systems, which would have been a valuable incremental step in the absence of Autonomy’s launch this week. However, Autonomy solved the deeper problem by making identity and trust the substrate of its entire platform. Developers building on Autonomy don’t need to think about “identity for agents”, at all, because it is already baked in.  Okta is the means. Autonomy gives you the ends.