Agentic systems need short-lived credentials as a baseline security control. That point is pretty clear . The harder part is when teams move from architecture diagrams to production systems and discover how much operational machinery underpins that decision.

Security teams often frame credential lifetime as a clean principle. Short-lived good and long-lived bad. Production systems rarely live inside principles alone. In reality, they live inside retry logic, partial failures, identity providers, cloud platform quirks, third-party APIs, and on-call rotations. All this is made more difficult by the probabilistic nature of AI systems.

Agents behave differently from traditional services. A narrow service usually connects to a known set of systems and follows a fairly stable path. An agent can work across tools, call external APIs, carry context from one step to the next, and continue work after the original trigger is gone.…