5 Astrix and Aembit Alternatives for AI Agent Identity Security

Cisco completed its acquisition of Astrix Security on June 29, 2026, after reportedly agreeing to pay approximately $400 million. Cisco plans to integrate Astrix’s non-human identity and AI agent security capabilities into Cisco Identity Intelligence, Secure Access and Duo. Organizations considering Astrix may therefore want to compare independent alternatives while Cisco completes the integration.

A 2026 survey by the Cloud Security Alliance and Token Security found that 65% of 418 IT and security professionals reported at least one AI agent-related security incident during the previous 12 months. Among respondents reporting incidents, 61% cited data exposure or mishandling, 43% reported operational disruption and 35% reported financial losses.

Cisco’s AI Readiness Index found that 24% of surveyed organizations said they could control AI agent actions with appropriate guardrails and live monitoring, while 31% considered themselves capable of securing agentic AI systems.

Non-human identities include API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens and credentials used by AI agents. Astrix’s founders estimated that these identities can outnumber human identities by as much as 100 to one while receiving less than 5% of enterprise identity-governance oversight, according to a Cloud Security Alliance research note.

Meticulous Research estimates that the non-human identity access-management market will grow from $11.3 billion in 2025 to $38.8 billion by 2036.

This article evaluates five platforms that may serve as alternatives to Astrix, with different approaches to workload identity, non-human identity governance and runtime authorization. Aembit remains available as an independent workload identity platform. It is included as a comparison point for teams considering different approaches to non-human identity and AI agent access.

For a broader look at why traditional IAM crumbles under agentic workloads, read HackRead’s deep dive: The Security Problem With AI Agents Is Delegated Authority.

Methodology: How We Evaluated the Alternatives

We assessed each platform against five criteria tailored to AI agent identity management in 2026:

1. Identity Model – cryptographic identity issuance and lifecycle management for AI agents (OAuth/OIDC, SPIFFE, ephemeral tokens).
2. Credential Security – just‑in‑time and vault‑less secrets, resistance to static credential theft.
3. Policy Enforcement – runtime fine‑grained authorization (Zanzibar, ABAC, MCP gateway) with real‑time revocation.
4. Audit & Observability – OpenTelemetry tracing, SIEM export, decommissioning workflows, and audit trail completeness.
5. Deployment Flexibility – self‑hosted, SaaS, composable modules, and hybrid/multi‑cloud fit.

The comparison is intended for enterprise security teams managing AI agent identities across cloud, on-premises and SaaS environments. We examined how each option addresses the five criteria above, along with the type of organization it suits and its practical limitations. The products serve different purposes, so their order should not be treated as a universal ranking.

1. Ory

Ory delivers a highly engineered, modular, API‑first IAM stack that’s purpose‑built for cloud‑native environments, providing real-time policy enforcement and identity controls directly at the point of AI agent execution.

Every agent and sub‑agent gets its own distinct credentials, fine‑grained authorization is continuously enforced through a low-latency Zanzibar‑style permissions engine (Ory Keto), and all actions are streamed via OpenTelemetry to your SIEM.

Ory offers self-managed deployment for on-premises and private-cloud environments, while Ory Network provides a fully managed SaaS option. Organizations can choose between them according to their operational and data-control requirements.

According to Ory, its components handle more than 4.4 billion transactions per day across more than 34,000 production deployments. The company also says OpenAI uses the open-source Ory Hydra project for its OAuth 2.0 infrastructure.

• API‑First & Composable: The stack breaks into independent, headless modules – Ory Kratos for identity/auth, Ory Hydra for OAuth2/OIDC, Ory Keto for Zanzibar‑based permissions, Ory Oathkeeper as an identity‑aware proxy, Ory Talos to secure API keys, and Ory Polis for SAML/SCIM bridging, giving teams complete UI/UX freedom. Ory’s established open-source projects, including Kratos, Hydra, Keto and Oathkeeper, are written in Go and can be deployed independently.

• Agent‑Native Security: Ory Agent Security works with Anthropic Claude Agent SDK, Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, Microsoft Agent Framework, and many others. Each agent and sub‑agent authenticates with its own credentials, runtime authorization is enforced, and every action is recorded to SIEM.

• Agent DX: In June 2026, Ory launched a plugin‑based toolset that brings its identity platform directly into AI coding agents via plugins for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI, letting developers scaffold authentication workflows through natural‑language prompts, as reported by AiThority.

Best for DevOps‑centric, cloud‑native teams that demand API‑first composability and complete structural control at large scale, especially those requiring the rare ability to enforce strict runtime security policies directly at the point of autonomous AI agent execution.

Less ideal if you rely heavily on polished GUI‑driven setup or require out‑of‑the-box SAML in the free tier.

Ory’s sweet spot is the team that wants maximum engineering control and an API‑first identity fabric that can stretch from human users to autonomous agent fleets, without ever handing over data or the roadmap to a closed SaaS vendor.

2. Oasis Security

Oasis Security was founded in 2022 and provides a non-human identity and agentic access governance platform with just-in-time access and unified policy controls across IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and on-premises environments.

Oasis raised $120 million in a March 2026 Series B led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Cyberstarts, Sequoia Capital and Accel, bringing its reported funding to $195 million.

• Unified NHI & Agent Governance: A single policy control layer spans multi‑cloud, with automated discovery and continuous lifecycle management for all non‑human identities, including AI agents.

• Risk Reduction: Just-in-time access reduces reliance on persistent, standing credentials. The platform’s policy intelligence flags over-privileged and unused identities, helping teams reduce unnecessary access.

Best for organizations with sprawling multi‑cloud estates that need automated NHI governance without managing infrastructure themselves.

Less ideal if you require an open‑source, self‑hosted model or deep runtime cryptographic enforcement. Oasis leans heavily into governance and policy intelligence, not low‑level workload identity issuance.

If your biggest headache is finding every agent and secret scattered across environments and then applying consistent lifecycle controls, Oasis is a compelling choice. Teams that prefer a SaaS‑first NHI command center will find it a natural fit.

3. Teleport

Teleport’s Machine & Workload Identity platform replaces static secrets with short‑lived, SPIFFE‑compatible certificates, giving you least‑privilege, fully audited access for AI agents, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, SSH, and databases.

Adoption is surging: Teleport jumped more than 1,000 places on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list, explicitly citing AI agent identity demand as the growth engine, Compare the Cloud noted.

• Ephemeral Cryptographic Identity: Teleport issues X.509 and JWT SVIDs at runtime, automatically renewing them, with workload attribute bindings for fine‑grained policy. No more static secrets sitting in config files.

• AI‑Driven Market Traction: Ranked No. 1,508 on the Inc. 5000, up from No. 2,551 in 2025 with AI agent identity cited as the primary growth driver.

• Infrastructure Identity Hub: Unifies access for SSH, databases, Kubernetes, and MCP connections, eliminating the need for a patchwork of point solutions.

Best for security‑conscious teams that already need a robust infrastructure identity backbone and want to extend cryptographic identity to AI agents with minimal operational overhead.

Less ideal if you need dedicated NHI discovery and governance rather than an infrastructure-focused identity platform. Pricing depends on deployment size, selected features and commercial terms.

Users generally appreciate that all best practices are in place, but some find integration quirks with tools like ArgoCD and note that the auditing value is more post‑hoc than preventative.

Teleport shines when you want to treat every AI agent like a workload that must prove its identity cryptographically at every step, and you already love the idea of replacing VPNs with identity‑aware access.

4. SPIFFE/SPIRE

SPIFFE and SPIRE are the CNCF’s graduated projects that define and implement the industry standard for workload identity. SPIRE issues cryptographic SVIDs (X.509 certificates and JWTs) so services can establish zero‑trust mTLS without any pre‑shared secrets.

Because the standard is open and widely adopted across the cloud‑native ecosystem, it serves as the identity fabric beneath many agent‑security platforms, including Teleport and Aembit, and can be deployed directly by organizations that want full control.

• Open, Vendor‑Neutral Standard: CNCF‑graduated and community‑driven, SPIFFE avoids lock‑in and integrates with service meshes, orchestrators, and secret stores. No single vendor owns your identity layer.

• Low‑Level Identity Attestation: Agents prove their identity through node and workload attestation, ensuring that only verified processes receive a workload identity.

• Foundation for Custom Builds: You can layer custom policy engines, audit pipelines, and agent‑specific lifecycle management on top of SPIRE, tailoring exactly the control you need.

Best for engineering‑heavy organizations that want maximum control and interoperability, building their own agent‑identity layer on an open standard.

Less ideal if you need a turnkey SaaS solution with built‑in dashboards and non‑technical interfaces; SPIRE demands significant operational expertise.

If your team views identity infrastructure as a core competency and you want to build on a future‑proof, community‑owned standard, SPIRE is the right foundation. Expect to invest in tooling and expertise, but you’ll never be held hostage by a vendor.

5. Entro Security (now SailPoint)

SailPoint completed its acquisition of Entro Security on June 29, 2026, for an undisclosed amount (widely reported at ~$200 million), making the NHI platform immediately available as a standalone offering while native SailPoint integration continues.

Entro excels at discovering and inventorying non‑human identities and secrets, like AI agents, API keys, service accounts, and more, across 1,200+ secret types in CI/CD, codebases, and container registries. Its anomaly‑detection engine (NHIDR) surfaces inappropriate and suspicious access patterns continuously.

• Broad Discovery and Lifecycle: Automates the hunt for abandoned, over‑privileged, and unknown AI agent credentials across the entire software development lifecycle.

• Anomaly Detection: The NHIDR engine analyzes secret usage patterns to flag non‑compliant or suspicious credentials, often catching threats before they turn into incidents.

• Integration with SailPoint IAM: Existing SailPoint customers gain immediate access to Entro’s capabilities, and deeper correlations between human and non‑human access are on the roadmap as the two platforms merge.

Best for SailPoint shops that want a cohesive IAM and NHI governance experience, or any organization that needs to first discover and catalog the sprawling universe of agent credentials before applying runtime controls.

Less ideal if you require native runtime authorization for AI agents (Entro’s history is discovery‑first) or prefer an independent vendor outside a large suite.

If your biggest gap is knowing what non‑human identities you even have and cleaning up the mess of stale keys and rogue agents, Entro (via SailPoint) is a powerful, well‑funded starting point.

Caveats & Counterpoints

Market consolidation isn’t slowing down. In January 2026, CrowdStrike announced its intent to acquire SGNL, a runtime access enforcement platform for human, NHI, and AI agent identities, in a deal valued at nearly $740 million, CNBC reported.

So the landscape you commit to today might look different by next quarter. No single platform covers every dimension perfectly: governance tools (Oasis, Entro) excel at inventory and lifecycle but are weaker at runtime cryptographic enforcement, while cryptographic identity platforms (Teleport, SPIRE) nail attestation but often lack higher‑level policy intelligence. A best‑of‑breed stack may be unavoidable.

Projects like Ory and SPIRE offer freedom from vendor lock‑in but demand deep operational maturity; SaaS alternatives reduce overhead at the cost of data locality and flexibility. And technology alone can’t fix the process deficit.

Conclusion

With Astrix now part of Cisco and organizations reporting more AI agent-related security incidents, businesses need a clear identity strategy for autonomous systems.

The strongest replacement depends on your environment: Ory gives you an engineered, modular, and API‑first IAM stack for cloud‑native teams; Oasis provides turnkey, just‑in‑time NHI governance; Teleport extends cryptographic infrastructure identity to agents; SPIFFE/SPIRE offers standards‑based control for custom builds; and Entro (SailPoint) excels at discovery‑heavy environments.

Start with a limited pilot covering ephemeral credentials, fine-grained authorization, audit logging and credential decommissioning. Test revocation, failure behaviour and integration with existing identity systems before expanding deployment.