Vault + agentic AI
Enroll agents, govern and audit AI workflows with a Vault OAuth resource server supporting fine-grained authorization using RAR, and use the Vault MCP server to secure connections between AI agents and Vault.
Enterprise
Appropriate Vault Enterprise license required
Vault Enterprise 2.0.3+ provides the following native support for AI agents:
- Agentic IAM - Secure agentic AI workflows. Use the agent registry to enroll, govern, and audit agentic identities and the built-in OAuth resource server to validate tokens from trusted authorization servers and authorize access to Vault.
- MCP server - Integrate Vault with Claude for Desktop and other MCP clients to manage secrets and mounts.
Agentic IAM
Agentic IAM lets approved agents present an OAuth 2.0 token to Vault without a separate login step. Vault validates the token, resolves the client to a Vault identity entity, checks the for an associated agent registry record, and enforces authorization constraints for agentic workflows.
The Agent Registry and OAuth resource server configuration each contribute their own audit metadata. Refer to the OAuth JWT metadata reference for a specification of the detailed audit metadata.
When a client authenticates with an OAuth JWT, Vault does not create a stored token with an operator-defined metadata map. Instead, Vault derives token metadata from claims from the JWT each time the client presents the credential. The resulting token exists only for the lifetime of the request and Vault does not persist it to storage, so every request re-evaluates the claims in the presented JWT.
Agentic workflow support combines identity, credential validation, and governance:
- Vault validates an OAuth JWT using an OAuth resource server configuration profile.
- Vault resolves the authenticated client to a Vault Identity entity.
- Vault checks whether the relevant entity has an Agent Registry record.
- Vault evaluates the entity's baseline policies and, for delegated on-behalf-of workflows, the agent's authorization ceiling.
Vault Identity answers the question "who is this client?" The Agent Registry answers the question "is this client an approved agent, and what governance constraints apply to it?" OAuth resource server configuration answers the question "which external OAuth JWT issuers does Vault trust, and how should Vault validate their tokens?"
MCP server
Integrate clients like Claude for Desktop with Vault to managing secrets and
mounts using stdio and StreamableHTTP transports.