AI Agents Need Their Own Identity Before They Need a Gateway
A pair of VentureBeat guest essays argue that AI agents need their own identity before they need a gateway: a proxy can only enforce what it can attribute, and most organisations have no agent identity layer to attribute anything to. This piece explains the borrowed-token problem, the six-gate dependency-gated deployment model that puts the gateway fifth, the LiteLLM CVE-2026-42271 warning, the 2026 survey data on the machine-identity gap (109 machine identities per human, 68% unable to tell agents from people), what Okta, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Kong, the IETF and NIST have shipped, and a 30-day plan a UK business can run without buying anything.