Vercel wants to eliminate long-lived API keys from its ecosystem, and it is giving Marketplace vendors until January 2027 to comply or risk being delisted, a push that lands as a run of credential-stealing supply chain attacks — including a recent npm worm that scraped tokens straight out of CI pipelines — keeps proving how much damage a single leaked secret can do.
Vercel’s own GitHub Actions deployment workflow still relies on the kind of persistent credential the company now wants gone.
Developers have already pointed out a complication, though: Vercel’s own GitHub Actions deployment workflow still relies on the kind of persistent credential the company now wants gone.
In a Thursday announcement, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl says the company surveyed more than 1,000 SaaS vendors and found that only 8.4% supported what Vercel considers secure authentication methods, and it is now pushing OpenID Connect (OIDC) and short-lived, identity-based tokens as the alternative to static API keys that can stay valid indefinitely.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch amplifies the message on X, writing that it is “time to kill ‘static credentials’” and arguing that while attacks and breaches can still happen, stolen credentials should behave more like “self-destructing keys” that expire before an attacker can keep using them.
Vercel’s deployment double standard
Developer and senior software engineer at Fanatics, Yordis Prieto sharpens that point, writing in reply that Vercel had “invented” OIDC federation yet still left him leaning on “a long-lived access token” in his CI pipeline, and he presses the company to drop the token requirement from GitHub CI while criticizing its non-expiring token option.
Vercel’s GitHub Actions deployment guide still instructs developers to authenticate deployments with a VERCEL_TOKEN secret, and in Thursday’s announcement Ubl says the company is extending OIDC support across its API and CLI to retire long-lived tokens from deployment workflows, which for now leaves Vercel asking Marketplace vendors to adopt a standard its own deployment tooling has not fully implemented.
By November 30, Marketplace integrations that fall short of Vercel’s authentication requirements will carry a “Not secure” warning on their listing, and the company has not published its survey methodology, named the companies it surveyed, or disclosed how many existing Marketplace partners will have to change their authentication systems.
Short-lived tokens for agents
As AI agents gain access to more external services, credential management is becoming a greater consideration for agent harnesses. One way to reduce the risks of persistent access keys is to use short-lived, just-in-time credentials that expire rather than leaving agents with ongoing access.
As AI agents gain access to more external services, credential management is becoming a greater consideration for agent harnesses.
Vercel’s Connect service addresses part of that problem by letting applications and agents request scoped credentials at runtime using their deployment identity rather than storing secrets in application environments. Connect also handles token exchange and renewal.
An October 15 update added enterprise-managed authorization in public beta, allowing administrators to control access to supported services through identity providers such as Okta.
Connect still allows static keys
Even so, Vercel Connect still supports static API keys for providers that lack OAuth or another identity-based option, and its documentation describes storing those credentials centrally and pulling them at runtime, while the underlying keys can still live indefinitely.
The company also introduced GitHub OIDC authentication for its Container Registry in late September, though that work does nothing to remove the VERCEL_TOKEN requirement from its documented GitHub Actions deployment flow.
OIDC across Vercel’s own tooling
For now, Vercel faces the same job it is handing its Marketplace vendors: replacing long-lived credentials across infrastructure it already runs, and until OIDC support reaches workflows like GitHub Actions deployments, developers will keep needing the very tokens Vercel is urging the rest of the industry to give up.
…until OIDC support reaches workflows like GitHub Actions deployments, developers will keep needing the very tokens Vercel is urging the rest of the industry to give up.
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