Agent-First Federated Identity Broker
Keycard
Keycard is trying to become the translation layer that lets enterprises keep their existing identity stack while making AI agents safe enough to use in production. Instead of asking a company to replace Okta, Entra, or another identity system, it takes those existing credentials and turns them into short lived tokens tied to one agent runtime, one task, and one resource path. That matters because agents behave more like thousands of temporary contractors than like normal software users.
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The practical job is identity brokering, not user login. A human or system already authenticated by an existing provider delegates access, then Keycard mints a revocable token with exact scope and time limits, plus an audit trail from user to agent to target system.
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This sits in the same emerging category as Stytch and adjacent to WorkOS, but with a narrower agent first focus. Stytch emphasizes helping apps become OAuth identity servers for delegated agents, while WorkOS argues the winning products will stay close to existing OAuth rails rather than invent a brand new stack.
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The broader market pull is that many SaaS products now need delegation and fine grained permissions they never had to build before. As agents move from reading data to writing into systems, companies need scopes, consent, revocation, and logs, not just API keys pasted into a dashboard.
The next step is for agent identity to become standard enterprise plumbing. If that happens, the winning vendors will be the ones that fit cleanly into existing OAuth and IAM systems, add policy and audit controls for fast moving non human actors, and become the default broker between every app, model, and agent runtime.