Okta writes its own license to kill rogue AI agents

ai + ml Okta writes its own license to kill rogue AI agents  CEO Todd McKinnon says customers including ServiceNow want an off switch  O'Ryan Johnson O'Ryan Johnson Published fri 29 May 2026 // 22:20 UTC Rogue agents are dangerous, but eliminating them is never easy.  Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, and James Bond have each run afoul of their governance at various junctures, yet stopping them takes sequel after sequel until all the loose ends are tied up and they eventually die or retire, only to get rebooted.  It’s not so different in the world of AI agents.  REG AD Okta leaders, citing the company's own research, say enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than they are securing them, with 92 percent of executives reporting moderate or widespread use of autonomous AI agents, but only 22 percent saying their organizations have identities tied to those agents. REG AD “That is a real problem,” Okta president and chief operating officer Eric Kelleher said during the company's earnings call on Thursday. “It's a measurable, quantifiable exposure customers have right now within their companies, and they need to invest to fix it."  In short, when agents go sideways, someone has to handle the dirty work.  Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told investors that’s what ServiceNow was asking for when the ITSM market leader came calling.  “What they were really interested with Okta was this kill switch capability,” McKinnon said during earnings. “When agents go awry and agents aren't following the policy, how do you shut them down? … The one thing we do really well, and that they wanted from us, is the ability to sever the connections, the access tokens, the actual logical connection at the authorization layer to the backend resources, and we're really good at that.”  ServiceNow has previously said its acquisition of Veza could provide that capability. In a statement to The Register , a ServiceNow spokesperson said  Okta serves as the logical