Okta launches Agent SSO to standardize identity for AI agents

Okta has launched Agent SSO, extending its single sign-on capabilities to AI agents and giving enterprises a standardized way to manage the identity of their growing "digital labor" force.

According to a report by forkast.news, Okta positions Agent SSO as a key step toward standardizing digital labor identity. As agents access enterprise systems, call internal tools, and execute tasks, they need to be identified, authorized, and audited like human employees, and Agent SSO is designed as the unified gateway for that.

Over the past year, AI agents have moved from demos into production, handling customer service, code writing, data analysis, and other concrete work. That raises a new question: what permissions should these "employees" have, what data can they reach, and how are their actions recorded? Traditional identity systems were not built for this.

The significance of Agent SSO is that it reuses mature SSO protocols and governance models in the agent scenario, letting companies manage agent identities with the same processes they use for human employees and reducing the risks of shadow AI and unauthorized access.

For Okta, this is another step in the identity security market's shift to the AI era, as vendors increasingly treat "agent identity" as a new growth area and competition in the space heats up.

What to watch next is how deeply Agent SSO integrates with mainstream agent frameworks and enterprise applications, and how it performs on fine-grained permissions and behavioral auditing. Identity management for digital labor is becoming an unavoidable infrastructure issue for AI adoption.