Building Credential Infrastructure for Autonomous Agent Workforces

Short summary

As enterprises scale autonomous agents, credential and identity infrastructure — not capability — becomes the bottleneck. The article identifies three gaps: shared credentials without agent attribution, credential escapes, and lack of non-repudiation. It proposes a four-layer architecture (agent identity, token binding, credential vault, audit trail) that treats agent tokens like service accounts with stricter destination and operation scoping, referencing Mastercard's Agent Pay and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol as industry signals.

• •Agent identity infrastructure — not capability — is the bottleneck for scaling autonomous agents
• •Three key gaps: shared credentials, credential escapes, and no non-repudiation for agent decisions
• •Four-layer architecture: agent identity, token binding, credential vault, and immutable audit trail

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