1Password LLC today announced the launch of 1Password Credential Broker, a new product that hands out credentials, tokens and federated access from its vaults to trusted requesters only when they are needed, rather than leaving secrets scattered across apps, code and pipelines.

The launch reflects how credential use inside enterprises has changed. For two decades 1Password has stored the logins people type into a browser. Now machines need them too.

In 2026, software does much of the requesting now. Continuous integration/continuous deployment or CI/CD pipelines, cloud workloads, service accounts and artificial intelligence agents all pull credentials to do their jobs. To make that work, teams paste the secrets into repositories, drop them in config files, or leave them in environment variables, never to be cleaned up.

Credential Broker leaves the secret in the vault. It verifies who is asking, then releases only the one credential that the requester is cleared for. In the GitHub Actions flow, a workflow sends identity signals to 1Password, which matches them against a configured workload identity before handing over the credential. The credential itself is never copied into the pipeline or an environment file.

Fewer copies mean fewer places a static secret can leak or linger after it is needed. 1Password also logs each request and handoff so a security team can see which workflow or agent asked for a given credential and when.

The company says the product is built on its zero-knowledge architecture and is designed so its own infrastructure does not have persistent access to customer secrets. Customer-managed key material helps protects credentials from unilateral access, while identity verification helps govern who can retrieve them.

“1Password has always been the place enterprises trust to keep credentials safe. The next step is making that same source of truth work for every credential, whether it is requested by a person, a workflow or an AI agent,” said Chief Technology Officer Nancy Wang. “The 1Password Credential Broker is about closing the gap between where credentials are protected and where access happens.”

The release builds on a steady run of agent-focused work from 1Password over the past year. The company shipped just-in-time credential integrations for Cursor, Browserbase and Perplexity AI Inc.’s Comet browser. It also brought a Model Context Protocol server to OpenAI Group PBC’s Codex coding agent in May and introduced its Unified Access platform in March to govern access for people, machines and agents through a single identity model. Credential Broker slots into that platform as the mechanism that actually delivers a secret once a requester is trusted.

Credential Broker is available in private beta starting today, with initial support for GitHub Actions. 1Password said it plans to extend the same brokering model across human users, machine workloads and AI agents over time.

The company’s enterprise vault now protects more than 1.5 billion credentials and secrets and is used by more than 1 million developers and more than 180,000 businesses, including Canva Pty. Ltd., Cursor, Figma Inc., GitHub Inc., Hugging Face Inc., MongoDB Inc., Notion Labs Inc., Salesforce Inc., Stripe Inc. and Wiz Inc.

Photo: 1Password