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Control access at the moment an identity acts

P0 Security provides runtime access control for human agents.

Instead of relying on permanent roles, broad permissions or inherited access, P0 dynamically provisions the exact entitlement and identity needs for a specific task, resource and period of time.

Featured podcast

Why AI agents need more than authentication

In this Identity at the Center sponsor spotlight, host Jeff Steadman talks with P0 Security co-founder and CTO Greg Danyi about how organizations can control access as AI agents begin taking action across business systems.

Their conversation explores why authentication alone is not enough, how agents inherit dangerous permissions and why authorization has to happen when an action is being taken.

They also discuss:

Why an AI agent should have its own identity
How to prevent agents from inheriting a user’s full access\
How intent, context and business evidence can shape authorization
Why normal mistakes may create as much risk as malicious attacks
How dynamic permissions limit an agent’s potential blast radius
Why now is the best time to establish Zero Standing Privilege for agents
How organizations can start small without slowing AI adoption

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The access model is changing

Traditional access controls were built around relatively predictable users, applications and workflows.

AI agents break that model.

An agent may act on behalf of a person, respond to a ticket, call an MCP server, query a database and take action across several systems during a single session. Its identity alone does not tell you whether an action should be allowed.

You also also be able to quickly understand:

Who or what initiated the action
What task the agent is performing
Which systems and data it needs
What evidence supports the request
How long the access should last
Whether the action is appropriate right now

P0 evaluates that context and provisions only the permissions required for the task.

Authentication identifies the actor. Authorization controls the action.

Most organizations have invested heavily in authentication. They can verify the identity of a user, workload or agent. But once that identity is authenticated, it often receives broad permissions through a role, group, token or service account.

That leaves the harder question unanswered: What should this identity be allowed to do in this specific situation?

P0 brings authorization into the runtime flow so access can change based on the task, session, resource and business context.

Give every agent its own identity

Many agents currently operate using one of two models:

They inherit a human user’s permissions
They reuse a broadly privileged service account

Both models make it difficult to limit access, understand responsibility and produce a clear audit trail.

P0 treats the agent as its own identity while preserving the context of the person, workload or event that triggered it.

That creates a complete action chain:

Originator

Agent

Tool

Resource

Action

Security teams can determine what happened, what authorized it and which identity was responsible at every step.

Start agents with Zero Standing Privilege

Most enterprises are still early in agent adoption.

That creates a rare opportunity.

Instead of giving agents broad access and trying to remove it later, organizations can start with no standing privileges and dynamically provision only what each agentic session needs.

With P0, an agent can receive:

A dedicated identity
Task-specific permissions
Resource-level restrictions
Time-bound access
Session-level auditability
Immediate revocation when the task ends

The agent remains useful without being permanently trusted.

Dynamic Asset Management - Picture of forensic fingerprint

Control the blast radius, even when the agent gets it wrong

Not every risky agent action begins with an attacker.

An agent may misunderstand an instruction, respond to context drift, act on inaccurate information or follow a poorly written prompt exactly as written.

A simple mistake can become a serious incident when the agent has broad access.

P0 limits what the agent can reach before it acts. Even if the instruction is wrong or the agent behaves unexpectedly, its permissions remain constrained to the approved scope.

Use evidence instead of adding approval friction

Human approval is one form of authorization evidence. It is not the only one.

P0 can use existing business signals to determine whether access should be granted, including:

On-call status
Ticket ownership
Project assignment
Group membership
Customer responsibility
Change records
Resource attributes
Time, location and session context

This allows organizations to automate routine decisions while reserving human approval for higher-risk actions.

How P0 works

Discover

Understand the identities, permissions and access paths that exist across your environment, including users, service accounts, workloads and AI agents.

Control

Dynamically provision scoped access using native permissions in cloud platforms, databases, SaaS applications, developer tools and infrastructure.

Prove

Maintain an audit-ready record of every request, approval, policy decision, entitlement change and action.

Runtime access control for every identity

AI agents

Create dedicated agent identities and enforce permissions based on the originator, task, session and resource.

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Humans

Give employees and contractors Just-in-time access without permanent roles, shared credentials or lengthy ticketing processes.

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Non-human identities

Reduce the risk created by service accounts, API keys, workloads and long-lived credentials.

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Built for modern environments

P0 works through native APIs and existing authorization systems rather than adding another access path.

No bastions or jump hosts
No credential vault required
No permanent privileged roles
No new proxy infrastructure
No need to rebuild native permissions in a separate system

Teams can use the controls already available in AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, databases, GitHub and other systems while managing policy centrally through P0.

p0 chart showing its technology protecting a variety of systems

Start small. Establish the model. Expand from there.

Greg’s advice in the episode is simple: do not wait for the perfect enterprise-wide agent strategy. Choose one agent, one team or one workflow. Give the agent its own identity. Start with no standing privilege. Define what it should be able to do and learn from the first implementation. That is easier than trying to regain control after agents have already inherited broad access across the business.

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