Introducing 1Password® Unified Access: Identity Security for Humans and Their AI Agents

Agentic AI is changing how work gets done inside organizations. It’s embedded in IDEs and automation tools, and it’s showing up in browsers, internal workflows, and everyday productivity apps. Developers are using AI agents to accelerate engineering work, while knowledge workers are vibe coding apps without training on developer security practices, all of which create untenable risks for organizations. That shift has real implications for identity and access control. For years, identity security centered on login: authenticating the user, establishing a session, applying policy, and assuming authority for the duration of that session. That model worked for human access, but it breaks down when credentials are used by local AI agents, automation scripts, CI/CD pipelines, and AI-native tooling. In this new reality, authority shouldn’t be decided once at login and then trusted all day. It should be confirmed right when access is requested, every time a credential or secret is used. 

That’s why we’re introducing Unified Access Pro, available today. It helps teams discover, secure, and audit access across humans, agents, and machine identities, so organizations can adopt AI confidently and securely.

Discover risk where traditional identity security systems can’t

As work shifts to AI agents and automation, more credentials are used outside the identity systems that security teams rely on. It happens on employee devices, inside local development environments, and across browser-based AI tools. Security teams often have little insight into what’s happening on employee devices and in the tools they use every day, where credentials are created, stored, and first used.

That gap matters. Exposed SSH keys, plaintext .env files, long-lived API tokens, and locally installed agents rarely appear in traditional SaaS logs or federated identity systems. Yet these credentials can grant direct access to production systems and sensitive data. As more employees experiment with AI agents, the volume of unmanaged credentials in circulation increases, expanding an organization’s attack surface.

Unified Access extends visibility to where risk often starts: employee devices. It discovers AI tools and local agent activity across devices and browsers, identifies exposed credentials, connects findings back to real devices and users, and guides end-user remediation for better security practices. It discovers risk early so organizations can address it before credentials and secrets are exposed, misused, or exercised at scale.

Secure credentials with centralized governance and scoped runtime delivery

Discovery is only useful if it leads to action. Once you can see where credentials live and how they’re being used, the next step is bringing them under consistent control.

Unified Access centralizes credentials and secrets in a single, secure vault with consistent policies across humans, agents, and machine identities. It builds on 1Password’s enterprise vaulting foundation, trusted by more than 180,000 businesses and protecting more than 1.3 billion credentials and secrets. That includes employee usernames and passwords, as well as API keys, SSH keys, and environment files that developers rely on to connect systems and automate work. Instead of being scattered across local machines, configuration files, shared documents, and scripts, credentials are governed in one place and managed with consistent policy controls, even allowing security teams to take ownership of a credential and enable its use without ever exposing the secret itself.

As the lines between human and non-human access blur, the same credential might be used by an employee today and by an agent or automation workflow tomorrow. Unified Access provides a single source of truth, so access policies aren’t fragmented by where or how work happens. It also changes how credentials are delivered. Rather than distributing long-lived secrets and hoping they’re handled correctly, Unified Access can provide credentials to AI agents and machine identities at the moment they’re needed, evaluating access in context when it’s requested. As more work is delegated to agents, moving from “always-on” access to “just-in-time” access becomes critical.

Attribution across humans, agents, and machine identities

As credentials move across humans, agents, and machines, audit trails fragment. Human authentication lives in one system, service accounts typically live in another, and agent activity can span both, which makes it hard to answer basic governance questions. 

Unified Access brings credential access under one system of record, so security teams have a single place to see which credential was used, by whom or what, and when. That unified trail matters for incident response and for continuous governance as more work is delegated to agents.

Built alongside the platforms powering modern development

Unified Access is launching with collaborations across the AI and developer ecosystem, so teams can secure agent-driven workflows in the tools they already use.

• Foundation model providers: Anthropic and OpenAI are partnering with 1Password to enable the use of 1Password vault items in agentic browser-based flows and developer IDEs.

• AI developer tools: Cursor, GitHub, and Vercel integrate with 1Password to secure developer workflows across IDEs, cloud sandboxes, and CI/CD pipelines, with hooks available for Cursor agents and GitHub Actions.

• AI and cloud infrastructure: CoreWeave uses 1Password to discover, secure, and audit agentic workloads at the infrastructure level, and Commvault is partnering with 1Password to help organizations protect and manage access to critical data.

• MCP gateways: Natoma and Runlayer integrate 1Password to securely inject credentials into the agent sessions they manage, simplifying workflows and reducing secrets sprawl.

• AI browsers: Anchor Browser, Browserbase, KERNEL, and Perplexity integrate with 1Password so agent workflows can access secrets just-in-time, with least-privilege controls, and a clear audit trail of actions taken on a user’s behalf.

These collaborations reinforce the same point: as agents and automation become embedded in everyday workflows, credential security has to be built directly into the platforms where work happens.

Identity security for organizations adopting AI

AI is changing who can build, and how work gets done. That means credentials are moving faster, getting used in more places, and being exercised by more than just humans. Unified Access is built for that shift, with visibility at the edge, centralized control, runtime delivery, and unified audit across humans, agents, and machines.

Want to learn more about 1Password® Unified Access? Head here to get started.