AI agent identity lifecycle: joiner, mover and leaver for non-human accounts

Joiner-mover-leaver depends on an HR event. A person joins, a record appears in the HR system, and provisioning follows. An AI agent or a service account has no HR record. An engineer, a platform or another agent creates it, and it keeps working after the project that needed it ends.

Orchid Security's Identity Gap: 2026 Snapshot, based on anonymized telemetry from enterprise applications between April 2025 and March 2026, states that 67% of non-human accounts are created directly within applications. The share will differ in every estate, but the point holds: an account created inside an application never passes through the provisioning flow that JML relies on.

The common answer in 2026 is sponsorship: every non-human identity has a named person accountable for it. Microsoft's Entra what's new page lists "Manage Agent ID sponsorship lifecycle with Lifecycle Workflows" as generally available in May 2026, with tasks for sponsor transfers and notifications. Sponsorship maps onto the familiar stages:

• Joiner: the agent or service account is registered with a sponsor, a purpose and a scope.
• Mover: the sponsor changes role, or the agent's scope grows; the sponsorship transfers or the access is reviewed.
• Leaver: the project ends, or the sponsor leaves with no successor; credentials are revoked and the account removed.
• Review: the agent's permissions are certified on a schedule, like any other access.

When a sponsor leaves, the identities they sponsor face the same failure as an orphan account: they keep working with no owner. Treat a sponsor's leaver event as a trigger to review every identity that person sponsors.

Each item links to its source on the news page.

Three gaps are visible in the public material.

Discovery. Several vendors describe finding agents on endpoints, in cloud platforms or through tool-call monitoring. Accounts created inside an application's own user store are harder to see from outside the application. That is the same problem this site tracks for local accounts in disconnected applications, and it is where Orchid Security positions its discovery, feeding what it finds to the IGA already in place; Orchid joined SailPoint's Technology Alliance Partner program in August 2026.

Credentials. An agent that authenticates with a hardcoded key or a shared service account is not stopped by disabling an identity record. The leaver step has to include rotating or revoking the credential.

Standards. The OpenID Foundation approved the AuthZEN Authorization API 1.0 as a Final Specification on 12 January 2026, and the NIST NCCoE project on software and AI agent identity and authorization was still reviewing public comments when we checked in September 2026. Interoperable agent governance is early.

1. Inventory non-human accounts per application, including accounts created locally inside the application.
2. Assign a sponsor to every one, and add sponsor departure to the leaver checklist.
3. Put agent and service account permissions into the regular certification cycle, reviewed by the sponsor.
4. Record the credential type for each account, so a leaver action includes rotation where needed.
5. Ask each vendor which non-human accounts it discovers on its own, and which it governs only after someone registers them.