New York, London – September 15, 2026 – Orchid Security, which makes safe AI adoption possible by fixing identity at the root, today introduced a set of AI readiness controls for AI agents, headlined by identity drift detection and kill switches that operate at the application level. An agent pursuing a sanctioned goal can end up acting well above the privilege it started with — and it can get there in seconds. No security control has to fail and no workflow guardrail has to be bypassed. The agent simply locates the identity debt that enterprises have already accumulated: credentials baked into code, accounts nobody owns, authentication routes outside of management, and permissions far broader than any task requires. The new controls give organizations a way to expand agentic AI while holding autonomous identities within sanctioned limits.
Boards Are Making AI Adoption a Strategic Imperative
The board-level conversation has shifted. Directors are no longer weighing whether to adopt AI; they want to know how fast it can be scaled. Saying no has stopped functioning as a security strategy. What security teams require instead is a defensible operating plan — one that clears the path for adoption while keeping autonomous agents inside the boundaries they were granted.
"AI transformation is exciting. Identity hygiene is not," said Roy Katmor, co-founder and CEO of Orchid Security. "Boards are no longer asking whether AI will be adopted—they are asking why it is not moving faster, and security cannot answer with a blanket 'no.' Enterprises need to observe how agents act, understand when they drift, and govern them immediately, including terminating the authority through which they operate."
The risk does not originate in how agents behave. It originates in what they inherit. Overreach rarely requires defeating a control; agents simply draw on the identity debt already distributed across the estate — hard-coded secrets, orphaned accounts, unmanaged authentication paths, and excessive permissions. According to Orchid's Identity Gap 2026, 57% of enterprise identity sits outside visibility and management entirely. Agents are capable of converting that identity dark matter into a live route to elevated access within seconds or minutes, well ahead of any periodic governance review's ability to notice or stop it.
Timing is where the problem really bites. Quarterly access certifications and yearly attestations were built around human staff who shift roles perhaps a handful of times per career — not around non-human identities that can string permissions together across a dozen systems inside one session. AI readiness controls narrow that gap by converting identity oversight from a scheduled exercise into an ongoing one, so what the enterprise believes about effective authority matches the tempo at which agents genuinely work.
A Control-Led Model for Deploying AI Agents
Orchid delivers continuous, auditable AI readiness and defensibility through four stages — Observe, Understand, Govern, Prove:
- OBSERVE: Surface the AI agents in use along with the identities, applications, credentials, tools, and access routes they depend on. Behavior is captured as it actually happens, not simply as it was declared in the agent studio.
- UNDERSTAND: Measure runtime activity against the agent's stated purpose and sanctioned scope. Orchid attaches AI readiness tags to applications, accounts, and access paths, surfacing identity hygiene weaknesses, permission excess, and environments that are not yet fit for agentic access.
- GOVERN: Where behavior or effective authority moves outside policy, Orchid drives remediation through the identity, security, and AI systems the organization already runs. Responses range from trimming permissions, invalidating credentials, cutting off tools, and pausing workflows to the uniquely available option of firing its own application-level kill switch.
- PROVE: Orchid produces a defensible record tying every agent action back to the identity invoked, the delegation chain, the access path, the business rationale, any drift observed, and the governance step that followed.
Each stage supplies the input for the one after it, so the model is meant to run as a repeating cycle instead of a single readiness push. What agent behavior monitoring uncovers shapes new readiness tags; those tags determine which environments are cleared for autonomous access; and every governance action becomes evidence ready for the next audit.
Evidence Enterprises Need to Produce
Ahead of any large-scale autonomous agent rollout, an enterprise should be in a position to show the following:
- Identity Hygiene: Orphaned, dormant, local, and over-privileged accounts have all been located and given a readiness status.
- Authorization Guardrails: The organization can state who or what is permitted to act, on whose behalf, toward what end, and subject to which conditions.
- Runtime Understanding: Observed agent activity can be checked continuously against approved intent, granted permissions, and expected access routes.
- Universal Auditability: Each action maps back to an identity, a delegation chain, an application, an access path, and a business context.
- Enforceable Response: The enterprise can curtail or shut off, without delay, the authority a drifting agent is operating through.
Regulatory expectations are landing in the same place. NIST's draft Cyber AI Profile states that "regardless of where organizations are on their AI journey, their cybersecurity programs need risk management approaches that support and integrate the realities of advancements in AI." Across Europe, DORA requires financial entities to evidence control over ICT access and third-party dependencies — a duty that is not suspended simply because the actor in question is an agent instead of a person.
Ensuring Continuous Availability
Building on the agentic upgrades delivered to Orchid's Identity Control Plane in May, the following capabilities are generally available now:
- AI readiness tagging spanning applications, identities, and access paths
- Identity hygiene and security risk findings covering orphaned, dormant, over-permissioned, and suspicious accounts
- Ongoing drift detection comparing an agent's declared purpose with its observed activity
- Orchestrated response, including application-level kill switches that pare back permissions, invalidate credentials, sever tool connections, or halt agent workflows
- Audit generation capturing agent activity, identity context, drift that was detected, and the action taken
The company has also broadened its partner integrations:
- Palo Alto Networks Idira: A certified PAM integration that uncovers privileged accounts Idira had no record of and places them under management.
- Splunk Enterprise Security: An out-of-the-box integration that feeds identity telemetry into the SOC for correlation, investigation, and incident response.
Shannon Wilkinson, CIO and CISO at Findlay Automotive Group, framed the dilemma from an operator's vantage point: "The challenge is how to enable the business to move faster and realize the productivity that AI agents bring, but it honestly terrifies a lot of us. At Findlay we're leaning heavily into AI to build a better customer experience. At the same time we must define guidelines, put guardrails in place and, above all, know what the identities are doing."
Identity dark matter broadly — and weak identity hygiene in particular — has gone unaddressed in enterprises for years, which helps explain why adversaries today are likelier to log in than to hack in. Handing AI agents access to that accumulated identity clutter is an invitation to disaster.
For more on how Orchid Security secures autonomous identities, or to request a demo, visit https://www.orchid.security/use-case/guardrails-for-autonomous-identity.
Meet Us at Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit London 2026
Orchid Security is exhibiting at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, held at ExCeL London from September 22 to 24. Team members will be on the floor to talk through AI readiness and identity dark matter with security and risk executives. Visit Booth #105 for a live platform walkthrough, or book time ahead via the form to reserve a slot with the team.
Booth discussions will center on the questions security leaders are carrying into board meetings this year: where identity debt has piled up, how to tag which applications are cleared for agentic access, and what enforceable response actually looks like once an agent strays beyond its authorized scope.
About Orchid Security
Orchid Security sees straight into the application binary to deliver the industry's first Identity Control Plane, transforming IAM complexity into clarity, compliance, and control. Its Identity-First Security Orchestration platform continuously discovers enterprise applications, analyzes their native authentication and authorization flows, and accelerates onboarding into governance systems, putting true identity insight in front of security leaders and practitioners, without the months of manual work traditionally required for each task or informational ask. By exposing and remediating the 'identity dark matter' hidden across modern environments, Orchid helps enterprises solve identity at its core; reducing risk, lowering operational costs, and achieving compliance at scale.
Media Contact
Chloe Amante camante@montner.com Montner Tech PR
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