Tenable adds Microsoft Entra Agent ID support to Cloud Exposure

Why AI agents do not fit the usual identity buckets

Security teams normally sort identities into two groups: human identities and non-human identities (NHIs), such as service accounts, secrets and automated scripts. Tenable argues that treating AI agents as standard NHIs is "a recipe for disaster", as the company puts it in its blog post.

The reason, according to Tenable, is that agents combine a non-deterministic nature with the ability to carry out flexible, outcome-oriented actions instead of following strict instructions. Unlike classic scripts that follow rigid code paths, AI agents:

• make creative runtime decisions using LLMs;
• interact with dynamic external tools, memory caches and knowledge bases;
• constantly adapt to solve problems, which makes it hard to establish a baseline of normal behavior.

Tenable says major cloud providers have responded by introducing dedicated identity models for agentic AI. The post examines one of them, Microsoft Entra Agent ID.

How Microsoft Entra Agent ID is built

Tenable describes Entra Agent ID as an identity provider-centric design built on Entra ID. Its target scope covers any AI platform, including Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and third-party platforms not hosted on Azure. For hardening, it relies on permission boundaries and cascade rules, plus "on-behalf-of" user and agent dual authentication. Tenable rates its visibility as excellent because it covers unmanaged and external SaaS-based agents, but notes higher developer complexity because of the multi-object model and cross-tenant considerations.

The framework uses a four-tiered model:

• Agent identity blueprints are master templates for shared attributes. They reside only in the agent provider's home tenant and create cross-tenant links that, Tenable says, heighten exposure to potential supply-chain attacks.
• Agent identity blueprint principals are the local instance of a blueprint in each tenant where the agent is deployed and active.
• Agent identities are the functional identities used for routine tasks. Tenable calls these the primary entities security teams must monitor.
• Agent users are an optional layer for agents that need human-centric features, such as Microsoft Teams access or a personal mailbox, so they can work as "digital colleagues".

What Tenable One Cloud Exposure now does

Tenable says that native identity management tools from identity and cloud providers show only basic information about agentic identities. They do not explain security flaws or how these identities extend the attack surface. Because the identities are new, conventional identity and access management (IAM) systems may not recognize or monitor them, which creates blind spots.

Tenable's position is that visibility comes first: you cannot secure assets you do not know exist. With the new support, Tenable One Cloud Exposure brings Microsoft Entra agentic AI identities directly into the unified asset and identity inventory. The company also published a walkthrough video showing how the product discovers, inventories and maps these identities.

The post is written by Clément Notin, Staff Research Engineer at Tenable. He and fellow researcher Ron Popov presented a talk titled "Who Are the Robots? Uncovering AI Agents' Identities" at the fwd:cloudsec North America 2026 conference in Bellevue, Wash.

Advice for security teams

Tenable lists three key takeaways. Teams should assess their current maturity level and build an action plan to secure agent identities. They should use their cloud providers' native tools or Tenable One Cloud Exposure to locate and catalog every AI agent in their environment. And they should not assign human identities or over-privileged service accounts to agents deployed by vendors. Instead, Tenable says, organizations should require vendors to adopt official models such as Microsoft Entra Agent ID.

For companies rolling out agentic AI in Microsoft environments, the message is that inventory is the first step. The source does not give pricing or availability details for the new Entra support, so interested customers would need to check with Tenable.