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Non-Human Identity
Also known as: NHI · machine identity
Any identity used by software rather than a person to authenticate to other systems, such as service accounts, API keys and tokens. AI agents now hold and use many of them, which makes agent identity one of the main access-control questions in AI governance.
- agent identity
- service accounts
- API keys
- least privilege
- ASI03
Why agents change it
A traditional service account does one job. An agent may hold credentials for email, files, a CRM and several APIs at once, and decide for itself which to use. If it runs under a person's identity instead, the audit trail cannot tell what the person did from what the agent did on their behalf. Either way, the agent concentrates authority in a component that can be manipulated.
What good looks like
Give each agent its own identity, distinct from any person, so its actions are attributable. Scope its credentials to the task and make them short-lived. Record which person or process authorised each run. Rotate and revoke credentials as for any other privileged account. OWASP lists identity and privilege abuse among the top agentic risks (ASI03), and NIST's AI Agent Standards Initiative includes agent identity in its work. OWASP also publishes a separate Non-Human Identities Top 10.
Where it sits in the register
Over-broad credentials are excessive agency in autonomous agents in its most concrete form, and an agent acting under nobody's name is unclear AI ownership and accountability. The AI ownership and accountability framework gives each agent an owner.
Sources
Related Terms
Agentic AI
An AI system that pursues a goal by deciding for itself which actions to take, in what order, using tools and other systems it has been given access to, with a person checking some or none of the steps. The governance change is that the unit of risk stops being a single output and becomes a sequence of actions with consequences.
Audit Trail
A complete, timestamped record of the actions an AI system took and the decisions made with it, so that they can be reviewed, explained and attributed afterwards.
Excessive Agency
Giving an LLM-based system more functions, permissions or autonomy than its task needs, so that a manipulated or mistaken output becomes a damaging action. It is LLM03 in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2026, up from sixth place in 2025.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open protocol for connecting AI applications to external tools and data through servers that expose tools, resources and prompts. It has become the standard way to give an AI agent access to other systems, which makes its trust model the agent's attack surface: every connected server can steer the model as well as serve it.