BeyondTrust has expanded its Pathfinder Platform with new capabilities to secure AI agents working alongside users and autonomous AI workloads across cloud and SaaS environments. The update is supported by research from BeyondTrust Phantom Labs, which found that most enterprises are running unseen AI agents with privileged access that security teams cannot monitor or control.
AI agents are no longer experimental. They are production workloads, initiating API calls, using credentials, deploying code, and accessing sensitive data. Many are deployed in minutes on low-code platforms, often with privileges that rival or exceed those of human administrators.
In many enterprise environments, machine and AI identities already far outweigh human identities, dramatically expanding the privileged-identity attack surface. Yet most organizations lack any visibility into how many AI agents are operating in their environments, what those agents can access, or what happens when one of those agents is compromised.
These trends underscore the need for a unified approach to securing AI, human, and machine identities across environments.
“Agentic AI is not an isolated problem. It’s a subset of the broader non-human identity landscape,” said Marc Maiffret, Chief Technology Officer at BeyondTrust. “Organizations cannot secure agentic identities in a silo. These agents are interconnected with human identities, machine accounts, secrets, and entitlements across every environment. You need a platform that sees and secures the full spectrum, and that’s what Pathfinder delivers. Simply put, to get agentic AI right, you need to get privileged identity right.”
Securing AI Identities Across Coworkers and Workloads
The Pathfinder Platform provides defense for AI coworkers and local agents on endpoints, as well as for AI workloads running autonomously across cloud infrastructure and SaaS platforms.
New capabilities include:
- Endpoint Privilege Enforcement for AI Coworkers: BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) enforces least privilege and application control for AI clients operating on endpoints, such as Claude, ChatGPT, etc., ensuring AI tools can only execute actions permitted by policy—a critical enforcement plane that no other agentic AI security vendor delivers.
- AI Agent Discovery and Risk Analysis: Identity Security Insights delivers comprehensive agentic AI discovery, classification, and posture auditing with connector coverage spanning major enterprise AI platforms, including OpenAI (Admin, Projects, and ChatGPT Enterprise), Google Vertex AI and Discovery Engine, Salesforce Agentforce, ServiceNow AI agents, and AWS Bedrock. Organizations gain automatic discovery, privilege path mapping, risk scoring, and shadow AI detection wherever they deploy agents.
- Secrets Management for Autonomous Agents: BeyondTrust Password Safe vaults, rotates, and enforces just-in-time access for the secrets and API keys that power agentic workloads. Combined with Insights, organizations gain end-to-end visibility from agent discovery through credential management, eliminating the static credential exposure that creates persistent attack surfaces.
Managing the Explosion of Non-Human Identities
Telemetry surfaced through BeyondTrust’s Identity Security Insights, operating within the Pathfinder Platform, indicates AI agent growth is accelerating rapidly across enterprise environments. Over the past year, organizations analyzed through the Pathfinder Platform experienced a 466.7% increase in enterprise AI agents, many deployed through low-code platforms and automation frameworks that operate across endpoints, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications.
“The question security teams should be asking isn’t ‘do we have AI agents?’ You do,” Maiffret continued. “The question is: what can they access, what secrets are they using, and what happens if one gets compromised? A single AI agent’s blast radius can span your identity providers, cloud infrastructure, SaaS platforms, and on-prem directories all at once. Pathfinder maps those cross-domain privilege paths so you can see exactly how a compromised agent could escalate access across your entire environment.”
