ServiceNow’s AI Passport aims to govern what enterprise AI agents can do, using signed credentials and runtime checks. With NVIDIA supporting enforcement, the test is whether permissions can be upheld and revoked across third-party systems as businesses move agents into production safely at scale.
Nine years late, Tesla’s Roadster flipped, hovered and leapt over its siblings at a SpaceX rocket test site. Shares jumped, then fell. Social feeds caught fire. What Musk really unveiled was one engineering stack wearing two corporate badges. Success is not guaranteed. Excitement, as ever, is.
Hot inflation, record AI credit stress and a seven-day chip slide showed that the boom’s limit is no longer demand but the price of money. Investors are rotating rather than fleeing, and the bill is landing far from Silicon Valley.
ServiceNow’s AI Passport aims to govern what enterprise AI agents can do, using signed credentials and runtime checks. With NVIDIA supporting enforcement, the test is whether permissions can be upheld and revoked across third-party systems as businesses move agents into production safely at scale.
Enterprise AI agents are gaining access to systems faster than businesses can establish who authorised their actions. ServiceNow’s proposed answer is AI Passport: a cryptographically signed credential designed to define and verify what an agent can do while a workflow is running.
Announced on 15 October, the credential covers first- and third-party agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. It draws on ServiceNow’s configuration database, governance policies and workflow approvals to establish permitted scope. The company says enforcement can redirect, restrict or terminate agents that exceed it, with its Super Intelligence Control Tower retaining an audit record. These are announced capabilities; the release does not establish their effectiveness in customer deployments.
NVIDIA is the design and launch partner, developing an enforcement implementation through its Open Agent Safety Platform, including the OpenShell runtime and Sentry security framework. ServiceNow also outlined shadow-AI detection, more than 400 planned discovery connectors and tools to track AI expenditure across models, embedded software, cloud services and data-centre GPUs.
Availability matters. AI Passport, shadow-AI detection and AI Cost Management are expected in Q4 2026. The separate Operational Resilience solution for financial services is already available. Buyers should assess each capability against its delivery status.
As AI agents take on more responsibility inside businesses, approving the underlying model is only the beginning. Enterprises must establish which agents can access customer records, invoke tools, delegate work or change transactions, and how quickly that authority can be withdrawn during an incident.
“Enterprises need confidence that every AI agent is operating within its authorized scope,” said Jon Sigler, ServiceNow’s executive vice president and general manager, AI Platform.
That is the operational challenge AI Passport seeks to address: making permissions enforceable while an agent is working, with a clear record of who authorised its actions.
For banks and critical-infrastructure operators, the practical value would be enforceable permissions backed by evidence of who approved them. A signed credential can establish authority, but its usefulness depends on whether connected systems consistently enforce those limits.
The commercial stakes extend to the control layer itself. If credentials become a standard requirement for enterprise agents, the platforms issuing and verifying them could influence purchasing decisions across identity, security and AI governance.
ServiceNow says AI Passport uses open specifications. Buyers should test that promise through interoperability, revocation speed and enforcement across third-party systems. Those results will determine whether the product delivers meaningful operational control.
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Nine years late, Tesla’s Roadster flipped, hovered and leapt over its siblings at a SpaceX rocket test site. Shares jumped, then fell. Social feeds caught fire. What Musk really unveiled was one engineering stack wearing two corporate badges. Success is not guaranteed. Excitement, as ever, is.
Hot inflation, record AI credit stress and a seven-day chip slide showed that the boom’s limit is no longer demand but the price of money. Investors are rotating rather than fleeing, and the bill is landing far from Silicon Valley.
A bipartisan AI committee wants independent evaluators inside OpenAI and Anthropic and early access for security agencies. Read slowly, its letter to Albanese is a ransom note written in reverse. Australia is not being held hostage. It is offering itself, with its creative archive as collateral.
Donald Trump has handed America's highest science honours to Musk, Huang, Brin, Su, Nadella and Dell, crowning the builders of AI's chips, clouds and rockets. His maxim that whoever wins AI wins leaves no silver medal, and middle powers like Australia must now choose between partner and tenant.
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