What Are Non-Human Identities? (And Why You Should Care)

In the early days of the internet, authentication was simple: a user typed in a username and password, and the system decided whether to let them in. One identity, one human, one session.

Fast forward to today’s AI-powered, API-first, automation-obsessed software landscape — and that old mental model falls apart.

Because most of what logs into your systems isn’t human anymore.

👤 vs 🤖

Non-human identities (NHIs) are digital actors that operate autonomously — without a person sitting behind a keyboard. They can be anything from a scheduled script to a fully autonomous AI agent, and they’re quietly taking over your infrastructure.

Some examples:

• A GitHub Actions workflow deploying your code

• An AI agent summarizing customer tickets from Zendesk

• A payment gateway making a webhook callback

• A background job refreshing access tokens every 6 hours

• A Slack bot posting deployment statuses

• A microservice calling another microservice via API

These are non-human. But they still need to authenticate, authorize, and be accountable.

And here's the kicker: in most modern stacks, non-human identities now outnumber human users by more than 80:1.

Why It Matters

You wouldn't give a random intern root access to production. But chances are, your CI/CD pipeline already has it. And no one’s watching.

The dangers:

• Orphaned credentials: Scripts that still run, long after the developer who wrote them has left

• Over-permissioned bots: “Just give it admin, we’ll fix it later”

• Lack of visibility: No audit trail, no accountability

• Agent sprawl: AI tools spawning other tools, calling APIs with unknown scopes

As automation increases, so does the blast radius of any compromise. And attackers know it.

What Makes NHIs Hard to Secure

Humans can use passwords, passkeys, MFA, and can be educated on good behavior. Agents can’t.

They need:

• Machine-issuable credentials (like JWTs, mTLS, API keys)

• Short-lived tokens with tight scopes

• Automated rotation and revocation

• Policy-based access controls — defined in code

You can’t rely on a dashboard to govern them. You need infrastructure-native access controls.

The Future Is Automation-Native

AI agents, RPA bots, LLM wrappers, and headless services are just the beginning. The next wave of software will be built on autonomous systems talking to each other in real-time.

If your authentication and authorization stack is still built for humans, you're already behind.

We need to start treating non-human identities as first-class citizens:

• Give them unique IDs and clear ownership

• Limit what they can do and for how long

• Track, rotate, and revoke their credentials programmatically

• Audit and alert on unexpected behavior

Final Thought:

Software no longer starts with a human.

It starts with a system, an agent, or a service — logging in, making decisions, and acting.

If you’re not securing that layer, you’re not secure.