Agentic PAM, explained
Agents are the newest privileged users. They hold real credentials, act without a person watching, and make thousands of API calls an hour. PAM for agents applies the controls you already trust to every one of those calls.
Privileged access management exists because some identities can do far more damage than others. The discipline is well understood: vault the credentials, grant the least privilege needed, require approval for sensitive actions, attribute everything to a named identity, and keep a record that holds up afterwards.
Traditional PAM applies those controls to people and to sessions on infrastructure. AI agents need the same controls, applied somewhere else: at the moment an agent calls an API. That is where Alter sits, as the runtime control plane between agents and the systems they reach.
Why agents break the assumptions PAM was built on
The controls still apply. The place they have to run does not.
The privileged user is software
An agent decides at runtime what to call and with which arguments. Nobody reviewed that exact action when its access was granted.
The risk is in the API call
Agents rarely open a session on a server. They call SaaS and internal APIs thousands of times an hour, and each call is its own privileged action.
It acts for someone else
An agent usually acts on a person's behalf, sometimes through other agents. Every decision has to know both the agent and the human behind it.
Every agent action has to answer one question
Should this agent take this action, with this credential and this delegated authority, right now?
For every call routed through its proxy, Alter answers it in the request path, before the call completes, and records the answer. Asking once, when access is granted, is not the same thing.
The PAM controls, applied per call
Each control a PAM program already relies on, and what it becomes when the privileged user is an agent.
| Control | Traditional PAM, for people | Alter, for AI agents |
|---|---|---|
| Credential vaulting | Admin passwords and keys held in a vault, checked out to a person | OAuth tokens and API keys held in the vault and injected into each proxied call. Proxy-only agent keys never retrieve the credential. |
| Least privilege | Roles and account permissions granted ahead of time | Default-deny policy on every call: endpoint, method, network, time window, per-agent quota, and conditions on request parameters. |
| Approval workflows | A request to check out a credential or open a session | A policy can hold a specific pending request for a named approver, who reviews a redacted summary of it. It executes only after approval. |
| Identity and attribution | Named human accounts, shared accounts brokered | Every agent is its own principal with its own keys. Delegation chains can only narrow access and record who acted for whom. |
| Audit | Session logs and recordings for review | An append-only, hash-verified record of every credential access, policy decision and provider call, streamed to your SIEM. |
| Revocation | Disable the account, rotate the password | Revoke one agent, key or grant instantly. With identity-provider webhooks enabled, offboarding a user in Okta, Auth0, WorkOS or Clerk revokes their access in real time. |
Access windows vs. per-action decisions
An access window grants an agent access for a task and trusts what it does inside that window. Alter decides each call routed through its proxy on its endpoint and parameters, so the fiftieth call in a task is judged as carefully as the first. That is runtime action governance, not access approval.
- An access window answers who may act, and until when
- A per-action decision answers whether this exact call should run
- Every decision, allowed or not, is written to the audit trail
What Alter is not
Alter is not a replacement for the PAM you run for people and infrastructure. It does not record interactive sessions or broker logins to servers and databases. It runs as a managed cloud service or on-premises. Teams keep their existing PAM for human administrators and put Alter in front of what their agents call.
Put your agents under privileged access control.
Book a 30-minute walkthrough with the founders.