AI Agents Are Privileged Users; Who Is Auditing Their Access?
Dark Reading, Monday, September 28th, 2026
An IT audit leader argues AI agents should be governed as privileged identities, with ownership, logging, access reviews and containment.
Organizations protect human logins rigorously while granting AI agents broad production access through long-lived, overprivileged tokens and service accounts.
The author, an IT audit leader, argues that any agent able to execute code or modify records is effectively a privileged user and should be subject to segregation of duties.
He proposes audit questions covering business ownership of agent risk, telemetry that reconstructs prompts and tool calls, regular access certification to prevent zombie agent accounts, and out-of-band mechanisms to isolate or disable agents quickly.