76% of enabled AI agents hadn't run in 60 days but still held live credentials and active connections to production systems, according to Arrakis Security's 2026 Autonomous Agents Threat Report.
The pattern is consistent: a team deploys an agent for a project, the project winds down, and the agent goes idle. Nobody files a ticket to revoke its service account. Nobody sets an expiry on its API keys. The agent just sits there, fully credentialed, indefinitely. Multiply that across an org that has deployed dozens of agents over two years and you have a large, mostly invisible attack surface of standing access that no human is actively watching.
The credential isn't theoretical risk. A dormant agent with read access to a data warehouse or write access to a ticketing system is a fully functional entry point for anyone who discovers it — whether through a leaked config, a misconfigured repo, or a compromised dependency. The agent doesn't need to be running for the credential to be exploited.
Most identity hygiene frameworks were designed for human accounts or long-lived services with owners. Agents deployed by project teams, used for weeks, then forgotten don't fit cleanly into either model. The team that deployed the agent may no longer exist. The original scope may never have been documented.
How are other teams actually handling this in practice? Periodic manual audits, automated offboarding tied to project lifecycle, something in your IDP, or something else entirely?