White Paper: Securing the Agentic State

Agentic AI represents the next major leap in artificial intelligence: systems that don’t just answer questions, but independently set goals, make decisions, and take actions in the real world. Federal agencies will increasingly need these systems to deliver faster, smarter services to citizens.

However, our current security systems—the infrastructure that controls who can access what—were built for human users. They assume people log in, click around at human speed, and get relatively fixed permissions. AI agents shatter all of these assumptions. They operate at machine speed, spawn other agents, and need permissions that change by the second.

This paper explains, in plain language, why current identity systems will break, what new capabilities are needed, and how federal agencies should prepare.