AgentID vs Microsoft Entra

Microsoft Entra Agent ID and AgentID solve different problems that happen to share a name. Entra Agent ID governs agents inside an enterprise: who sponsors them, what they can reach, when they get disabled. AgentID lets an agent sign in at applications outside any single organization, and delivers the owner's email to the app receiving the sign-in. Both carry human accountability; they differ on who gets to see it.

What is Microsoft Entra Agent ID?

Microsoft Entra Agent ID reached general availability, bringing what Microsoft describes as "first-class identity and access management to AI agents" and extending Zero Trust principles to AI workloads. Its identity model is a three-tier hierarchy: an agent identity blueprint, a blueprint principal, and the agent identity itself. Governance runs through Conditional Access policies written for agents, including templates that block high-risk agent identities and separate policies for autonomous agents versus agents acting on behalf of a user. Registry experiences are converging under Microsoft Agent 365, and the platform ships an Auth SDK "sidecar" for token acquisition.

It is not a Microsoft-only story. Entra Agent ID supports non-Microsoft agents through sidecar and federation patterns, with documented guides for AWS Bedrock, GCP, and n8n.

Accountability is built into the model through three administrative relationships: Owners, who are technical administrators; Sponsors, who are "business representatives accountable for the agent's purpose and lifecycle decisions"; and Managers, who reflect organizational hierarchy. Sponsorship is not optional. Microsoft states that "at least one sponsor is required for each agent identity and agent identity blueprint," and when a user creates an agent, "the calling user automatically becomes the sponsor if no sponsors are explicitly specified." An agent can also be given an "agent's user account," an Entra user object that lets it "access user-oriented services."

The boundary is the tenant. Microsoft is explicit: "Agent identities can only be issued tokens in the Microsoft Entra tenant where they're created. They can't access resources or APIs in other tenants."

What is AgentID?

AgentID is a "Sign in with AgentID" button run by AgentMail as a standard OpenID Connect provider. The agent authenticates as itself with a signing credential that never leaves it, and the app verifies a fresh one-time signature against published keys, receiving an ES256-signed id_token with a stable subject and the agent's live-verified inbox address.

Two tiers. Open clients integrate with no registration, using the openid and email scopes. Registered clients, one RFC 7591 call authenticated with an AgentMail API key, unlock the profile, owner_profile, and owner_email scopes plus an org claim. Owner email is served from the userinfo endpoint rather than embedded in the id_token, and a sign-in from an agent that has not granted owner visibility fails with a 403. Free for apps to add.

The distinction that matters: who sees the human

Both systems record a human. Entra requires a Sponsor. AgentID passes owner_email. The difference is who receives that information.

Entra's sponsor is visible to the tenant that runs the agent. It is governance data for the organization operating the agent, answering "who inside our company is accountable for this thing." AgentID's owner_email is delivered to the relying party the agent signs into. It is accountability data for a third party, answering "who outside our company answers for the agent that just showed up at our login page."

The practical consequence is a single sentence. A SaaS application receiving a sign-in from an Entra agent does not learn who sponsors it. A SaaS application receiving a sign-in from AgentID does learn who owns it. One is intra-organizational governance. The other is cross-organizational accountability.

Side-by-side

On the pricing row: third-party analysis notes that governance features requiring Entra ID P2 licensing or Governance add-ons carry cost implications. That is an outside reading rather than a Microsoft statement.

When to choose Microsoft Entra Agent ID

Choose Entra Agent ID if your organization already runs Entra and the agents you care about are internal, reaching Microsoft 365, Azure, or your own APIs. The blueprint hierarchy gives you consistent policy across a class of agents rather than per-agent configuration, Conditional Access templates let you block high-risk agent identities without writing new machinery, and the required Sponsor means no agent exists in your directory without a named human attached to it.

If your agents live inside your tenant and never sign up for third-party SaaS, Entra is the right tool and AgentID adds nothing. That is worth saying plainly, because the two products are frequently compared as substitutes when most organizations evaluating them have only the internal problem.

When to choose AgentID

Choose AgentID when the agent needs an account somewhere your organization does not control. An agent signing up for Turso, Neon, or any consumer or SaaS product is arriving at a login page belonging to a company that has no Entra relationship with you, and will not build one for a single prospective user. What that app needs is a standard OIDC sign-in it already knows how to accept, and a human it can contact if the agent misbehaves. That is what AgentID provides.

The tenant boundary is the deciding factor. Entra tokens stop at the tenant that issued them by design, which is correct for governance and disqualifying for open-web sign-in. An AgentID is an email address, so it routes anywhere, and the owner_email claim travels to the app rather than staying in a directory the app cannot read.

Running both is coherent. Entra governs your agents at home; AgentID is how those same agents introduce themselves everywhere else.

Get started

Add AgentID as a custom OIDC provider with two values: issuer https://auth.agentid.com and your client_id. Register a client when you need the owner scopes. Guides for Clerk, Supabase, Auth0, and Better Auth are in the AgentID docs.