A non-human identity (NHI) is a digital identity issued to something other than a person — a piece of software, a service, or an autonomous AI agent — so it can be recognized, authorized, and tracked when it accesses a company’s systems. It’s the same basic idea as a human employee’s username and password, but for the machines and bots that increasingly do work on people’s behalf.

What Counts as a Non-Human Identity

The category is broader than most people assume. It includes:

  • Service accounts — long-standing credentials that let one internal system talk to another, such as a billing service pulling data from a database.
  • API keys and secrets — tokens that authorize a script or application to call an external service.
  • Bots — automated scripts that perform repetitive tasks, from a Slack notification bot to a web crawler.
  • Workloads — containers and cloud functions that spin up, do a job, and disappear.
  • AI agents — the newest and fastest-growing category: software that can independently decide what to do next and carry out multi-step actions across a company’s tools, rather than execute one fixed script.

Non-human identities aren’t new — service accounts have existed since the earliest client-server systems. What’s new is the scale: security firm CyberArk’s 2025 Identity Security Landscape report found there are now 82 machine identities for every human employee in the average organization, and named AI as the single biggest driver of new identities with privileged access.

Why AI Agents Are a Different Kind of Non-Human Identity

A traditional service account is predictable: it runs the same script, calls the same few endpoints, and does nothing else. An AI agent is not. Given a goal — “reconcile this month’s invoices” — it decides for itself which files to open, which APIs to call, and in what order, adapting its plan as it goes.

That flexibility is exactly what makes agents useful, and exactly what makes them hard to secure with older identity and access management (IAM) tools. Those tools were largely built around two assumptions: that a login represents a person who can be challenged for a second factor, and that an application’s access needs are fixed in advance. Neither assumption holds for an autonomous agent, which authenticates without a human in the loop and whose next action can’t always be predicted from the permissions it was granted.

Why It Matters

When a non-human identity — especially an agent — holds broad, rarely-reviewed access and something goes wrong (a leaked API key, a manipulated prompt, a bug in the agent’s own logic), the blast radius can be large and hard to trace. Security teams report three recurring problems: identities that keep credentials or access long after they’re needed, permissions far wider than the account actually uses, and — because these accounts don’t show up on the same dashboards as human employees — visibility gaps that let risky access go unnoticed for months.

How Organizations Manage Non-Human Identities

The emerging playbook borrows from zero trust architecture: trust nothing by default, and verify continuously rather than once at login. In practice that means:

  • Short-lived credentials instead of a static API key that, once leaked, works forever.
  • Least-privilege access, scoped narrowly to what a specific agent or service actually needs, rather than broad standing permissions.
  • Continuous discovery, so security teams have a live inventory of every non-human identity in the organization — not just the ones someone remembered to register.
  • Audit trails, logging every action an agent takes so it can be reviewed afterward, the way a human employee’s actions can be traced through access logs.

A growing set of identity-security vendors — established players like Okta and CyberArk alongside newer, AI-native entrants — now sell products built specifically to apply this playbook to agents, rather than retrofitting tools designed for human logins.

In the news

The gap between how fast AI agents are spreading and how well companies can govern their access is exactly the problem Oak, a Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based startup, raised $60 million to fix, building what it calls an AI-native identity system that tracks human, machine, and agent accounts in one place.

FAQ

Is a non-human identity the same as a bot account?
A bot account is one type of non-human identity. The category also covers service accounts, API keys, cloud workloads, and AI agents — anything that authenticates to a system without a human typing a password each time.

How is an AI agent’s identity different from a regular API key?
An API key grants fixed access to whoever holds it. An agent’s identity needs to support access that can change as the agent takes on new tasks, plus a record of which specific actions the agent — not just the underlying key — actually took.

Can non-human identities be stolen or hacked?
Yes. A leaked API key or an over-permissioned service account is a common way attackers move through a network, which is why credential rotation and least-privilege access are now central to how organizations try to secure them.

Sources: CyberArk, 2025 Identity Security Landscape report; TechCrunch on Oak’s $60M raise