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Study Warns AI Adoption is Trading Identity Security for Speed
AI adoption is forcing companies to trade security for speed -- and identity controls are the first casualty.
A key finding in the 2026 Identity Security Report by Delinea, a provider of identity security solutions for both human and AI agent identities, says 90 percent of organizations are forcing their security teams to loosen identity controls for AI.
In simpler terms, companies are prioritizing speed over security in deploying AI tools, with leadership focused on faster adoption to drive productivity gains.
The major problem is that it leaves organizations heavily exposed to security vulnerabilities. Companies are fast-tracking AI initiatives, despite significant gaps in AI identity discovery, monitoring, and privilege control.
"The pressure to move fast on AI is real, but identity governance has not kept pace, which exposes enterprises to significant risk," said Delinia CEO Art Gilliland, in a statement.
Over 2,000 IT decision-makers actively using or piloting AI were surveyed by Delinea. According to the report, 90 percent of respondents had at least one “identity visibility gap,” with the largest gap tied to machine and non-human identities (NHIs), including accounts used by AI agents.
"As AI agents multiply across enterprise environments, these identities often have the least oversight, Gilliland said. "The organizations that will succeed in the AI era will be the ones that enforce real-time, contextual access across every human, machine, and agentic AI identity."
Several key findings from the report showed that:
- AI expansion is driving non-human identity risk: 42 percent of organizations say AI expansion has been one of the top factors increasing NHI risk in the past 12 months, far surpassing increased automation (26 percent) and CI/CD velocity (26 percent), and growth in cloud-native workloads (26 percent).
- Limited visibility into privileged AI actions: 80 percent of organizations say they are unable to always understand why an NHI performed a privileged action, highlighting major challenges with traceability and accountability for automated identities.
- Standing access remains the norm: 59 percent of organizations report lacking viable alternatives to standing privileged access for NHIs and AI agents, increasing the risk that automated identities retain persistent permissions that can be exploited.
The result is that traditional identity protections haven't kept up with AI, and loosening identity controls has provided bad actors with an exponentially larger attack surface.
The report concluded that AI would continue to break traditional security models as companies allow their security controls to grow lax and more identities and access points appear.
"Clearly, organizations can’t afford to slow down AI adoption," Delinea said. "But the study indicates that identity security must evolve alongside AI adoption."