Identity as Infrastructure in the Agentic Era
From Resilient Cyber by Chris Hughes
May 13, 2026 · 34 min
About this episode
In this episode, Chris Hughes interviews Karl McGuinness about the challenges of identity management for AI agents.
In this episode of Resilient Cyber, I sat down with Karl McGuinness — author of Control Plane and one of the sharpest voices working on identity in the agentic era — to unpack what most of the industry is still getting wrong about IAM for AI agents. Karl's thesis is a provocation: we spent two decades optimizing authentication and authorization, and we built that stack for human-paced execution. Agents remove the presence, pacing, and natural scope-limiting that made those controls work — and...
People in this episode
Host: Chris Hughes
Guest: Karl McGuinness
Topics covered
- identity management
- AI agents
- authentication
- authorization
- technology
- agentic era
Keywords
- identity management
- IAM
- AI agents
- authentication
- authorization
- agentic era
- Control Plane
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Control Plane
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