17 of 40 teams that say they enforce AI agent permissions still share the credentials behind them

VentureBeat · Louis Columbus · 2026-10-16 13:00 UTC

17 of 40 teams enforcing AI agent permissions still share credentials. Only 14 of 100 could revoke an agent’s access within minutes.

VentureBeat’s September 2026 Agentic Security and Identity survey asked 102 enterprises how they secure and revoke AI agent access. Forty described a program that enforces scoped identities and runtime permission checks, and 17 of those 40 then said some or most of their agents still share credentials. Only 14 of the overall 102 said they could revoke access within minutes.

Earlier this month, agentic security company Zenity Labs revealed what one compromised credential can reach when the execution role covers every agent in an account. A single prompt to one public-facing agent with a URL-fetching tool on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore returned its temporary AWS credentials. Because the default identity and access management (IAM) role covered every AgentCore resource in the same account and region, those credentials could launch other agents, read their sessions, and pull secrets.

The next day, Fireworks AI posted a security bulletin disclosing that an unauthorized third party had used compromised internal credentials to reach environment variables in customer evaluation jobs. Fireworks says it believes the attacker captured API keys and tokens stored as secrets in some affected accounts. Four days after detection, Fireworks completed one credential review, adding that more rotation was still underway.

Read the full story at VentureBeat · All coverage of this story