The State of AI Agent Access Management in 2026
Last updated: 11 August 2026
Security teams spent the last year giving AI agents real access to production systems, customer data and internal tools. Most are still governing that access the way they governed a human employee: a login, a role, and a hope that someone remembers to switch it off later. A new category of vendor exists specifically to close that gap, replacing standing agent credentials with access that is granted, checked and logged at the moment an agent actually acts.
This report tracks how AI assistants themselves describe that category: which vendors get named, how much of the answer each one earns, and which pages AI is actually reading to write those answers. The questions are the ones a CISO, an IAM lead or a security architect would type into ChatGPT, Gemini or Google today.
Methodology
We track 55 buyer questions about AI agent identity and access management. The figures below come from 401 answers collected on 11 August 2026 across ChatGPT (135), Gemini (135) and Google AI Overview (131).
We record what the engine returns, not what it is asked. No brand gets credit for appearing in a question.
Named in answers shows the share of answers that mention a brand. Share of the answer shows a brand's share of every measured brand mention. Average position shows where a brand lands when it is named, with a lower number meaning it lands earlier in the answer.
What this category covers, and what it doesn't
AI agent identity and access management is a specific, narrow lane. It discovers every AI agent and MCP connection running inside a company, replaces standing agent credentials with short-lived access evaluated at the moment an agent acts, routes a request to a human when an agent needs something it doesn't already have, and produces one record tying each agent's action back to the person who owns it.
Three adjacent categories get folded into it by mistake. General identity platforms (Okta, Microsoft Entra, SailPoint) are built around human employee logins and are adding agent features on top of that. Privileged access platforms (CyberArk, BeyondTrust, HashiCorp Vault) are built around vaulting and rotating credentials for privileged human accounts, and are extending that to agent credentials. Agent security platforms (Lakera, Zenity) inspect what a model does and says, prompt injection, jailbreaks, unsafe output, rather than what access it holds. All three are real and growing. None of them is what this report measures.
The 2026 leaderboard
| Rank | Brand | Named in answers | Share of the answer | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oasis Security | 5.74% | 7.98% | 2.3 |
| 2 | Aembit | 5.24% | 36.77% | 1.7 |
| 2 | Astrix Security | 5.24% | 7.78% | 1.6 |
| 4 | Token Security | 4.99% | 15.37% | 1.3 |
| 4 | P0 Security | 4.99% | 7.59% | 1.6 |
| 6 | Entro Security | 2.49% | 2.72% | 1.4 |
| 7 | C1 | 2.24% | 17.32% | 1.9 |
| 8 | Opal Security | 2.00% | 2.72% | 4.1 |
| 9 | Cakewalk | 1.00% | 1.75% | 6.7 |
Ranks 2 and 4 are tied pairs on how often each brand is named, ordered above by how many times each is actually mentioned once it appears.
Naming and share of the answer tell different stories
Oasis Security is named in more answers than any other measured brand, 5.74% of the total. Aembit is named in slightly fewer, 5.24%, yet takes more than a third of the entire measured conversation, 36.77% of every brand mention counted.
The difference is repetition, not reach. When Aembit is named, it is named again inside the same answer, an average of nine mentions in every answer where it appears. Oasis Security, once named, is mentioned an average of 1.8 times. Aembit is not winning more shortlists than Oasis Security. It is taking up far more of the room on the shortlists it makes.
Where the answers come from
Microsoft's own identity documentation is the single most retrieved source in the category, pulled into 18.70% of the answers we tracked. LinkedIn follows at 17.21%, then Medium at 10.47%.
The fourth largest source is a name most buyers have never heard of: the Non-Human Identity Management Group, an independent research and practitioner community built specifically around this category. It's retrieved in 9.98% of answers, ahead of Okta's own documentation (9.73%) and arXiv (9.48%).
Every one of the nine vendors this report tracks has its own site retrieved less often than that. The highest, Oasis Security, reaches 6.48%. The lowest, including Cakewalk and Entro Security, sit at 2.74%, both level with each other rather than one ahead of the other.
The lesson for any vendor in this category: a well-built product page competes with the whole internet's identity documentation, not just with the other eight logos in the category.
What to check before you shortlist a vendor
The vendors in this category converge on similar claims: zero standing access, runtime policy evaluation, one record tying every action back to a human. Six checks separate a genuine implementation from a roadmap slide:
- Does policy run at the moment the agent acts, or only when access is first granted?
- Can it route a blocked request to a human and resume the agent with the same context, or does the agent simply fail?
- Does one record cover every agent and every connected application, or is it a separate log per integration?
- Does an agent's access expire automatically when the employee who owns it changes role or leaves?
- Can it work with agents built on any framework, not only the model providers it was demonstrated on?
- Is there a named, paying enterprise customer behind the claim, not just a product demo?
Buyers are already asking
The questions above aren't hypothetical. They're close paraphrases of what security buyers are typing into ChatGPT, Gemini and Google this year: how a runtime gateway actually intercepts a tool call, what happens to an agent's access when the person who owns it leaves, what a board wants to hear about ungoverned agents in one slide. The vendors that show up in the answer are the ones whose pages, comparisons and community presence AI can already find, not necessarily the ones with the strongest product underneath.
If you want the same view for your own category, book 20 minutes with Marco.
