Identity becomes the 2026 battleground as AI erases trust signals

In 2026, identity becomes the fight that defines security. As enterprises adopt agentic AI, the identity challenge expands far beyond people: non-human identities, short-lived tokens, and swarms of MCP-connected agents are multiplying faster than most IAM programs can govern. Traditional trust signals—from passwords to profile photos—are being blurred by automation, deepfakes, and real-time impersonation. The result: identity is both the primary attack surface and the top place to invest.

Infostealers industrialize compromise

Infostealer malware has turned credential theft into a low-cost commodity, making initial access easy to buy, reuse, and automate. Ian Gray, Vice President of Intelligence at Flashpoint, notes that credential marketplaces and malware logs continue to underpin many incidents, proving that identity is now the front door attackers prefer to walk through rather than break down.

Passwordless goes mainstream

Passkey adoption is accelerating across browsers, operating systems, identity platforms, and credential tools. As cross-device portability, credential exchange, and recovery options improve, the business case for passwordless gets simpler. The priority, however, is coupling strong authentication with strong detection.

“Identity has shifted from an employee productivity enabler to an attack amplifier. It’s no surprise that Expel found that 74% of the attacks they investigated in Q3 2025 were tied to compromised identities. The new adage that ‘attackers don’t hack in, they log in,’ continues to gain traction. This attack concentration is a wake-up call. It’s the signal telling you it’s time to prioritize securing identity in your organization. This starts with implementing passwordless technologies, such as passkeys, and enhancing your post-login activity monitoring to quickly identify when attackers compromise an account.”

Phishing-resistant methods will take center stage. As David Cottingham, president of rf IDEAS, warns, AI-crafted lures have rendered “spot the typo” training obsolete:

“The solution lies in reducing reliance on human judgment alone and implementing phishing-resistant authentication methods like FIDO2 and smart card-based access.”

AI agents strain authentication—and patience

“Identity is reaching its breaking point as users face fatigue around MFA, rotating credentials and app-specific logins. AI agents will add a new layer of complexity as these tools require user credentials to act on their behalf, often with security as an afterthought. The future of authentication lies in smarter, invisible systems that continuously verify users based on behavior, context and device trust while reducing the need for passwords or tokens. The industry needs to shift from proving who you are to proving you’re still you.”

Non-human identities will dominate spending and strategy. Arvind Nithrakashyap, CTO and co-founder of Rubrik, says attackers will continue to exploit the labyrinth of service accounts, tokens, and machine credentials—at scale. A recent survey found 89% of organizations plan to hire professionals in the next 12 months specifically to manage identity security, a sign that identity infrastructure is becoming more critical than ever.

Agentic AI: identity as the new soft target

“While automation can replace repetitive tasks across the enterprise, organizations must not make the critical mistake of substituting human judgement for AI at the intelligence level. This is paramount because a critical threat in 2026 is agentic AI autonomy weaponized against soft targets — API integrations and identity systems. The only winning defense will be human-led and AI-scaled, prioritizing purposeful use to keep organizations ahead of this exponential risk.”

“Coding agents will accelerate development, but also generate identity misconfigurations at scale. Hard-coded credentials, mis-scoped tokens, over-privileged service accounts, and flawed entitlement mappings will propagate through IaC and DevOps pipelines, creating systemic identity debt.”

AI’s favorite protocol won’t be exempt. Nancy Wang, SVP and head of engineering and AI at 1Password, cautions that MCP was built for interoperability, not containment. She argues the standard needs a trust layer to be enterprise-ready:

“As MCP becomes the lingua franca of agentic AI, it will need a trust layer: a way to verify which agents exist, who they represent, and what they’re allowed to do… The ecosystem needs credential brokering, runtime policy enforcement, and verifiable auditability.”

“IAM stacks built for people cannot keep up with ephemeral agents, short-lived tokens, and dynamic workflows… identity systems [must be] redesigned with NHI as the default, not an afterthought.”

Phishing moves to chat—and happens in real time

Expect collaboration platforms to become the new “smishing.” Rhys Downing, threat researcher at Ontinue, warns that features enabling external chats can invite real-time impersonation inside trusted workspaces:

“Attackers can purchase a Teams license, spin up a tenant, and send an invitation straight to a user’s inbox and chat window… Once the victim joins, the threat actor can impersonate IT staff or colleagues, deliver malicious files, or socially engineer the user in real time.”

The result: higher rates of malware delivery, unauthorized access, and employee compromise—without a single phishing email.

Deepfakes and geopolitics raise the stakes

Gary Barlet, Public Sector CTO at Illumio, anticipates a global rise in AI-enabled deepfake crises in 2026, compounding the chaos around identity verification. Meanwhile, cross-border identity policies are poised to become geopolitical flashpoints.

“Every country is pursuing its own vision of national digital identity, but there’s no shared framework for trusting one another’s systems… we’re heading toward an environment where countries increasingly refuse to accept foreign digital credentials in favor of their own… It will accelerate sharply around next year’s election cycle, where identity misuse and influence operations become a major driver of foreign interference.”

What to do now

• Adopt phishing-resistant, passwordless auth (passkeys, FIDO2, smart cards).
• Instrument post-login monitoring to catch session hijacking and lateral movement fast.
• Inventory, scope, and rotate non-human identities; enforce least privilege and short-lived tokens.
• Harden AI pipelines: remove hard-coded secrets, lint IaC for identity drift, and gate CI/CD with policy.
• Add an MCP trust layer: credential brokering, runtime policy enforcement, and verifiable audit logging.
• Lock down collaboration platforms: restrict external chats, verify tenants, and monitor file delivery in DMs.
• Prepare for deepfakes: establish verification backchannels and incident playbooks for executive impersonation.
• Keep humans in the loop: pair analyst judgment with automation to outpace agentic threats.
• Engage legal and public affairs on cross-border identity assurance and data-sharing agreements.

Identity is no longer a supporting control—it’s the battleground. In the age of agentic AI, winners will treat identity as critical infrastructure, rebuild it for machines as well as people, and verify continuously—without slowing the work that keeps the business moving.