Identity has always been a cornerstone of digital trust, but in today’s world of agentic AI, overprivileged accounts and converging customer and workforce systems, the stakes have never been higher.

Anthropic Identity’s James Bonifield discusses human-centric identity security with theCUBE.

What’s often ignored, however, is that alongside the technological side in securing trust, there’s a human side. That misalignment inspired Anthropic Identity LLC and the company’s human-centric focus to identity management and security, according to James Bonifield (pictured), chief executive officer of Anthropic Identity.

“I was over at Optiv for about three years running the Okta Practice,” he said. “I felt like in my time there, that there was a serious need in the marketplace for focus on the unique challenges of customer identity and taking the unique skill set that is required to be successful with those technologies. Not as many firms and not as many people are specifically focusing on that narrow need and that narrow requirement — that was the genesis. The idea was that instead of saying customer identity, we were going to say human-centric identity. That’s where the ‘Anthropic’ in the name comes from.”

Bonifield spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Jackie McGuire at Okta’s Oktane event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why companies must rethink identity and what it takes to build trust at scale. (* Disclosure below.)

Agentic AI forces a rethink of digital trust consolidation

Agentic AI is forcing enterprises to confront identity issues that were long overlooked. Overprivileged accounts, once a manageable risk, become dangerous when paired with AI agents that can instantly exploit digital trust gaps, according to Bonifield.

“As these application teams and as these companies are looking to make their applications available for agentic AI and building some of these capabilities, there’s a lot of modernization that needs to happen, both in terms of the identity side and the application side,” he said. “We’re doing a lot of work around tools like Okta’s Fine-Grained Authorization in terms of being able to bridge that gap between legacy technologies and legacy authorization models and leveraging a tool like that.”

Authentication tools are maturing, but authorization remains a “wild west” as enterprises prepare apps for AI integration, Bonifield added. Okta and its partners — including Anthropic Identity — are working to define best practices for managing non-human identities and fine-grained authorization.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Okta’s Oktane event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Okta’s Oktane event. Neither Okta Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE