BeyondTrust has introduced a new governance solution designed to help organisations manage the growing number of non-human identities (NHIs) across cloud, SaaS, endpoint and on-premises environments, as enterprises grapple with the security risks posed by AI agents, service accounts and machine identities.
The new offering, NHI Governance, extends BeyondTrust’s privilege management approach beyond human users to include service accounts, API keys, OAuth clients, workload identities and AI agents. The company said these identities now outnumber employees in most organisations, yet often remain unowned, overprivileged and largely ungoverned.
According to BeyondTrust Phantom Labs research, enterprise AI agents have grown by more than 460 percent year over year, while non-human identities already vastly outnumber human identities. The company argues that simply discovering these identities is no longer sufficient, particularly as attackers increasingly exploit trusted OAuth tokens and other machine credentials in software supply chain attacks.
“Seeing non-human identities was only half the equation,” said Marc Maiffret, Chief Technology Officer, BeyondTrust. “The other half is doing something about the privilege they carry at scale: deciding who owns each one, pulling back the privilege they aren’t using, and retiring the ones that should not exist. And doing so without requiring teams to address them one by one with the limited time they have. That’s not paperwork you bolt onto a tool built for employee onboarding. That’s managing non-human identities at machine scale.”
The company said NHI Governance is designed to establish ownership for every non-human identity, enforce least-privilege access, retire stale or orphaned identities and bring AI agents under the same governance framework using dedicated credentials and controlled access.
Built on the BeyondTrust Pathfinder platform, the solution expands the company’s identity security portfolio by combining identity discovery, credential management and lifecycle governance. BeyondTrust said NHI Governance is planned for general availability in the United States in autumn 2026, with additional global regions to follow.
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