Analysis
Okta, Descope, ServiceNow, Cequence, Postman, and Microsoft are each filling the identity vacuum with different architectures, different standards references, and different bets on what sticks. The divergence is the story.
Six vendors are now shipping agent identity products. The IETF has not finished writing the standard any of them would need.
Our coverage of the IETF standardization gap mapped the structural problem: ID-JAG remains an Internet-Draft (-04, expires November 22, 2026), the agentproto Working Group has a contested charter, and the WIMSE and DAWN efforts are either scoped away from agents or still early. What that piece did not map is what deployers actually have to choose from right now. The answer is six implementations that split into two architectural camps, each filling the same vacuum with a different bet on how identity should work.
The first camp builds on ID-JAG, the Internet-Draft that is the closest thing the industry has to a unified token-exchange standard for agent identity. Okta’s Agent SSO, which reached general availability on August 24, 2026, uses ID-JAG as the scoped token for cross-app authorization. The company’s Cross-App Access protocol, which the IETF OAuth Working Group adopted in September 2025 and incorporated into MCP as the Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension, now backs a coalition of 25-plus partners including Anthropic, Zoom, Slack, and Cloudflare. Okta’s move is to make ID-JAG the enterprise default through sheer distribution reach.
Descope’s Agentic Identity Hub 3.0, shipped October 15, 2026, takes the same standard and embeds it deeper. Descope is the first NHI vendor to place MCP-native authorization directly in the gateway layer, and it both issues and validates ID-JAGs so agents can obtain access tokens across identity providers without a separate consent screen for every connection. The company claims millions of agents secured and over 1,000 protected MCP servers, including those on the Claude and ChatGPT app stores (vendor-published data). Its Agentic Governance Suite adds a request-justify-approve-review onboarding flow so every agent ends up with a documented purpose, an accountable owner, and least-privilege access. The SPIFFE workload identity and mutual TLS support go further than Okta’s current posture on client authentication.
The second camp does not anchor to ID-JAG at all. These vendors build protocol-agnostic governance layers that enforce policy regardless of which token format the agent presents. Postman’s Fabric Gateway, shipped September 29, 2026, governs HTTP, gRPC, MCP, and A2A traffic through a unified registry and a credential brokering layer that handles OAuth and vault-managed keys. Postman manages the control plane; the customer runs the data plane in their own VPC. One endpoint reaches more than 1,000 LLM providers, making it the largest distribution surface in the API economy.
ServiceNow’s AI Passport, announced October 15 and available Q4 2026, grounds agent identity in something the protocol-first vendors lack: enterprise business context. Each agent gets a cryptographically signed credential verified at runtime against ServiceNow’s CMDB, GRC policies, and workflow approvals. The system builds on the AIMS and WIMSE specification families rather than ID-JAG. Enforcement is graduated: redirect, restrict, reconnect, and a machine-speed kill switch. Shadow AI detection finds unapproved agents already running in the network. ServiceNow cites Gartner research that the average Fortune 500 enterprise will manage over 150,000 agents by 2028 (vendor-published data sourced from Gartner).
Cequence’s Agent Trust, launched October 7, 2026, takes a different angle entirely: behavioral detection. Built on the same bot and API traffic analysis Cequence has used for years, Agent Trust uses a protocol-agnostic agent identity registry paired with biometric verification to identify agents at the transaction level. It can block, slow, or challenge specific harmful requests while allowing legitimate activity through. Cequence research from September 2026 found Meta Muse agent traffic at more than half of its studied customers, with Muse presenting itself as an ordinary Chrome browser rather than identifying as an AI agent (vendor-published data). That finding illustrates the problem Agent Trust exists to solve: agents that do not announce themselves.
Microsoft Entra Agent ID, generally available since April 2026, occupies its own position. It introduces a purpose-built identity construct – distinct from generic app registrations – with three components: Agent Identity as a specialized service principal, Agent Identity Blueprint as the template holding credentials and configuration, and an optional Agent User Account as a companion user object. Human sponsor assignment, access packages with expiration workflows, and Conditional Access policies give enterprises the lifecycle controls they already know from managing human identities. Supported across Copilot Studio, Security Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and Microsoft Agent 365, Entra Agent ID uses OAuth 2.0 flows, MCP, and A2A protocols but does not specifically implement ID-JAG.
The divergence between these two camps is not a technical footnote. It is the central fact deployers face today. Vendors are building on different subsets of emerging specifications – ID-JAG, AIMS, WIMSE, or behavioral heuristics alone – meaning no enterprise can pick a single standards-compliant stack and be confident it will interoperate with the others. The IETF agentproto Working Group is active, but its contested scope – 154 attendees supported forming the group, only 38 endorsed the proposed charter – signals that consensus on what agent identity even means is still forming.
For builders, the practical guidance is to separate the identity decision from the enforcement decision. Pick an identity approach that can bridge across protocols – Descope’s ID-JAG issuance/validation or Postman’s protocol-agnostic brokering – and an enforcement layer that fits your existing infrastructure. For investors, the governance-as-moat thesis this publication has tracked since August is now playing out across six distinct product categories. The vendors that capture the policy enforcement, credential brokering, and audit layer between agents and the systems they touch are writing the standard in code. The RFC will catch up.
Blair Hayes works for Forkast.
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