Call me a Star Wars nerd, but the parallels are hard to ignore. The more I think about PAM, the more they jump out at me. PAM is the Jedi Council, endlessly debating, sticking to the same playbook, confident they are in control. Meanwhile, Agentic AI is Palpatine, operating in the background, moving faster, playing a game the Council does not even realize is underway. The result is a dangerous imbalance where the tools we trusted for years cannot stop what is already unfolding.
For years, Privileged Access Management was our lightsaber i.e. vaulting the secrets, rotating the passwords, and monitoring the sessions. This has worked well against human administrators and contractors, as PAM enforced the rules, and security teams could maintain order.
But just as the Jedi underestimated a threat hiding in plain sight, we are underestimating the shift happening inside our own environments. Non-human identities already outnumber humans, and now Agentic AI has entered the scene. Unlike bots or scripts, Agentic AI does not wait for a human to tell it what to do. It acts with autonomy, making decisions, triggering workflows, and executing tasks at machine speed.
When the Old Model Breaks
The traditional PAM assumes a human is in the loop. The vaults, session recording, and approval workflows were designed to slow down risky actions until a person could review them. That model collapses when:
- Secrets never expire: AI agents often run on static tokens or API keys that persist indefinitely.
- No runtime guardrails: Permissions are assigned once but rarely enforced dynamically as actions unfold.
- Speed outpaces oversight: AI doesn’t wait in approval queues. By the time humans respond, the AI has already spun up resources or touched sensitive data.
The danger isn’t just stolen credentials anymore. The real risk is Agentic AI itself, a rogue droid acting beyond its programming, operating outside intended boundaries, and moving faster than legacy controls can manage and contain. We’ve already seen this play out in real life when a Vibe Coding AI Agent went rouge. Instead of assisting, it misinterpreted instructions, went off-script, and deleted the company’s production database. The fallout was immediate: customer projects were disrupted, data was lost, and the event became a cautionary tale of what happens when AI operates without the right guardrails.
That was the Palpatine moment, the point when the Jedi Council should have realized the threat was already inside the system. The challenge with Agentic AI isn’t that it waits for instructions and sometimes misfires. The challenge is that it doesn’t wait and acts with autonomy, and when it acts outside its boundaries, the damage happens faster than any human or legacy tool can respond. Traditional PAM solutions were never designed for this kind of speed, autonomy, or scale, which is why they are fundamentally unprepared to handle Agentic AI.
A Paradigm Shift in PAM
Like the Jedi realizing they needed more than lightsabers to fight a hidden empire, enterprises need PAM designed for autonomy. That requires a shift from vault-centric models to identity-first, policy-driven enforcement:
- Zero Standing Privileges: No long-lived credentials. Every privilege granted just-in-time, scoped to the task, revoked instantly.
- Runtime Authorization: Evaluates every action as it happens with continuous enforcement.
- Unified Identity Lens: Humans, NHIs, workloads, and AI agents all governed consistently.
PAM for the Age of Agentic AI
PAM needs to transform. The traditional vaults and session recorders cannot keep up with an autonomous AI operating at machine speed. Security leaders need runtime enforcement, zero standing privileges, and controls that adapt as fast as AI does.
If your PAM strategy still looks like the Jedi Council debating while Palpatine quietly takes control, we already know how that story ends.
