The definition of identity is expanding. Employees are no longer the only actors – or ‘workers’ – inside enterprise environments. Service accounts, APIs, workload identities, and increasingly autonomous AI agents are now executing actions on behalf of humans and systems at machine speed and scale. This is the next generation of identity and its risks.
At SentinelOne®, we believe identity security must evolve to meet this reality by going beyond static gatekeeping. It must validate behavioral intent, ensuring protection is a continuous evaluation of what happens after access is granted.
The Authorization Gap
Many security frameworks focus heavily on the moment of authentication. The focus has long been on stronger gates: we see this in the push towards tighter governance and more granular permission models – these controls are fundamental. But authentication alone does not validate intent, and authorized access does not guarantee safe behavior.
As the industry explores centralized broker models for agents and non-human identities, one principle remains constant: authorization alone is not sufficient. Access must be continuously validated and, when necessary, withdrawn at runtime. SentinelOne’s execution-first architecture is designed to ensure that even approved actions remain bounded by real-time behavioral guardrails within the execution layer, where intent turns into observable technical behavior. Our approach is an end-to-end execution defense that spans endpoints, browsers, and AI workflows to stop misuse as it happens. This creates a security model that ensures defense is defined by session behavior, not simply initiation.
The New Execution Surface
In the modern enterprise, the browser has become one of the most important operating environments. It’s where SaaS applications run and where cloud infrastructure is managed. At the same time, it’s operating alongside rich endpoint software, including local AI workloads and integrated development environments (IDEs) – all contributing to a complex digital footprint. Consequently, it’s also where identity risk increasingly manifests. Browsers now represent sophisticated execution surfaces where users (and attackers) interact with company secrets and sensitive intellectual property. Misuse shows up in interaction patterns, prompt content, and data movement across tools.
SentinelOne secures this surface through recently acquired Prompt Security, monitoring the execution signals that define modern work. This approach avoids the friction of specialized enterprise browsers or the instability of JavaScript virtualization, both of which can increase operational complexity and expand the attack surface. By delivering native inspection within the browsers enterprises already use, we enable security that is seamless, flexible and unobtrusive, allowing organizations to protect AI-driven workflows without disrupting user choice or productivity.
And because Prompt is deeply integrated within the Singularity™ Platform, browser and AI execution is correlated with identity context and endpoint telemetry. This unified view reveals how an identity is interacting with AI tools and web applications. When activity begins to drift into malicious behavior, the platform identifies the shift and autonomously mitigates risk in real time.
Identity Beyond Humans: Securing Non-Human Execution
Identity today extends far beyond employees – non-human identities (NHIs) are now one of the fastest growing and most critical areas in identity security. Service accounts, APIs, workload identities, and increasingly autonomous AI agents are executing actions across cloud, SaaS, and AI environments. These NHIs often operate with persistent privileges, broad access, and limited visibility. As organizations automate more workflows and adopt agentic AI systems, NHIs represent one of the fastest growing and least understood attack surfaces.
SentinelOne is already protecting non-human identities through that lens. Within Singularity Identity, we provide a first-class inventory of service accounts and workload identities, applying identity security policies, detections, and posture checks purpose-built for non-human misconfigurations and misuse. On the AI front, Prompt Security extends visibility into emerging agentic AI activity and MCP monitoring. Through our agentic AI discovery capabilities – now in beta – organizations can identify autonomous AI identities interacting with enterprise systems, bringing clarity to a rapidly expanding class of machine actors.
These capabilities reflect a broader execution-first principle: non-human identities should be evaluated not only by what permissions they hold, but by how they behave over time. As automation accelerates, cohesion across human and non-human identity controls becomes essential. Aligning inventory and detection & response into a unified NHI control model is a natural next step in extending execution-based security across all identities operating in the enterprise.
Meet the New Singularity Identity: Simplified, Unified, Powerful
To support this evolution toward execution-based security, we are introducing the next chapter of our identity portfolio with the general availability of three critical capabilities across our unified identity protection experience, which spans on-premises and cloud identity providers:
- Policy-based Conditional Access: We are moving beyond static rules. This provides the granular, real-time control necessary to ensure that access is a living evaluation based on defined conditions across human and non-human identities.
- Compromised Credential Protection: We are stopping attacks before they even hit the front door by proactively identifying and neutralizing credentials that have been exposed in the wild.
- A Unified Approach to Identity Protection: This evolution is mirrored in our new streamlined portfolio. We have consolidated all of our identity capabilities into a single, unified solution: Singularity Identity. By bringing our identity innovations together into one comprehensive layer of the Singularity Platform, we have made it simpler for organizations to deploy the high-fidelity behavioral signals and autonomous containment required for modern defense – and to validate identities, not just authorize them.
But this launch represents more than a packaging update. It reflects a broader strategy that extends beyond traditional identity boundaries across the Singularity Platform. Prompt Security empowers visibility into browser activity, SaaS interaction patterns, and emerging agentic AI identities. This ensures that identity context is not confined to authentication events or directory objects, but enriched by real execution signals across AI and web workflows.
One Platform, One Continuous Execution Fabric
Modern attacks unfold across identities, browsers, endpoints, AI tools, and automated workloads. Securing authorized paths requires continuous validation across all of them.
As agentic AI proliferates, non-human identities now vastly outnumber human users. Every AI agent requires credentials, permissions, and governance. Traditional identity platforms were designed for human users and static service accounts, not autonomous agents executing and disappearing in milliseconds.
While human identity requires continuous verification of who is acting, non-human identity requires continuous verification of intent – whether a service account or AI agent is performing the actions it is supposed to, based on expected behavior patterns. Authorization alone cannot provide that validation, as a compromised non-human identity may still hold valid credentials and appear authorized, yet its behavior can deviate from its intended purpose. This creates the gap between access and safe execution. In practice, the framework splits: human identity is continuously verified for authenticity, non-human identity is continuously validated for intent, and both feed attribution and accountability across the enterprise.
SentinelOne’s architecture is built for this evolution. Grounded in execution, SentinelOne delivers end-to-end visibility and response across both human and non-human activity:
- Singularity Identity provides critical context for who or what is acting
- Prompt Security surfaces misuse within the browser and AI tools
- Singularity Endpoint validates behavior at the system level
Together, these capabilities form a continuous execution fabric, correlating activity across human and non-human identities, applications, and devices. SentinelOne is the only major platform delivering immediate, complete GenAI visibility and data protection at the point of every employee interaction on every managed device – all deployable without SASE rearchitecture or API-level code changes.
In an era where sophisticated threats are hiding behind legitimate access and automation is accelerating machine-driven activity, enterprise resilience depends on securing execution itself – at machine speed. SentinelOne is transforming identity from a static gate into a continuous engine of behavioral validation – securing the integrity of every action taken within the modern enterprise, whether initiated by a person, a service account, or an AI agent.
Ready to explore the new features?
Take the next step in securing your execution layer. See Singularity Identity in action against real-world attack scenarios. Contact us or request a demo to get started.
Existing identity customers can talk to their account manager for more information about the new Singularity Identity and its expanded capabilities.
