When an AI agent does something you did not expect, the first question is simple: who is responsible for this agent? With shared keys and service accounts the answer is often no one in particular. The agent is a process with a credential, and the credential is not a person. Accountability is the part of agent identity that borrowed keys quietly drop.
Two roles, kept apart
Oathera records two distinct people for an agent. The principal is the person who signed in through the identity provider and approved the agent's enrollment. The sponsor is the person or organization accountable for the agent, named and verified against the company's proofing sources and recorded with its enrollment. Keeping them apart means the act of approving an agent and the duty of answering for it are never confused.
Approval is a real event, not a checkbox
A principal signs in at the company's identity provider with OIDC and PKCE, sees the requested and granted clearance, and approves. The identity service writes the enrollment record and the Identity MCP verifies the signed activation. The activation code is single use and expires in ten minutes. Every action the agent later takes traces back to that approval and to the person who gave it.
Joiner, mover, leaver, for agents
People change roles and leave. Oathera learns departures from the identity provider and accepts an account-disabled event over Shared Signals. Deprovisioning a person stops every agent they approved, without touching anyone else's sign-in. When a principal leaves, another principal of the same sponsor approves each agent again within a grace period, so an orphaned agent does not simply keep running unattended. Revoking an agent refuses its next token request and next boundary decision; issued tokens stay valid only until they expire.
How Oathera helps
Oathera gives every AI agent an identity bound to the machine it runs on, approved by a named person, and checked every time it acts. The principal and the sponsor make "approved by a named person" concrete, and the link to your identity provider means an agent's right to act ends when the person behind it does. Oathera does not verify people itself; it relies on your identity provider and proofing sources, and sits as the identity layer under your IAM and AI governance.
See it, or build it with us
Watch a stolen token fail, a replayed proof get refused and a tampered call get caught, in the simulator at sim.oathera.org. Our first design partners start in early November 2026. If you are putting agents into production, become a design partner.
Every AI agent, sworn in.