People have trusted 1Password with the credentials behind their digital lives for years. How does 1Password extend that trust to AI agent access while ensuring that the customer is always in control of their information and how it’s accessed?
As Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, puts it, “The agentic web is here earlier than people expected.” It seems like every day, AI agents are able to do more to interact with systems and take action for users, but the speed of their development has left traditional security falling behind.
To be useful, agents need access to your accounts. For instance, an agent can plan a trip for you, but would need access to your desired airline account or favorite travel booking website to do so. The value of such use-cases is clear, but giving agents access should not require that you let them see or store your credentials. Pasting your password into a prompt means allowing the agent to have access to your credential, potentially beyond the task at hand.
What’s needed now more than ever is a secure, seamless way to approve sign-ins for personal agents to access accounts they need to carry out tasks, all without exposing login credentials to the agent.
1Password solves this through 1Password for Agents, which enables users to safely provide access to AI agents like Muse, from Meta, SpaceXSI Grok Bot, and Town. 1Password for Agents makes secure sign-in standard for the personal AI agents people use today.
Personal AI agents can plan trips, manage calendars, organize events, and complete tasks across the websites and services you use every day. But to do that work, agents need access to the accounts you want them to interface with.
That creates a dilemma: how can an agent act on your behalf without taking possession of your passwords or compromising your security and privacy?
The answer lies in 1Password for Agents’ security model, which is built upon the fundamental 1Password security model that’s trusted by millions to protect how they live and work. Everything 1Password does is guided by principles that put your safety first. One of these principles is that only you should have the keys required to the data you store in 1Password.
Here’s how authorization is built to stay true to the principles of those security models so that:
1Password securely stores your credentials
Agents can’t see your credentials at sign-in
Agents cannot autonomously interact with your vault
To connect an agent app, you sign into 1Password. When you connect the accounts, your device then creates keys for the connection and encrypts them with a new integration key. 1Password stores the encrypted keys. Only the agent developer receives the integration key, so 1Password can’t decrypt them.
These keys ensure that, as always, all vault data is encrypted at rest.
Once the connection and keys are in place, an agent has to follow a set process to sign in through a browser without handling one of your vault items.
The agent reaches a sign-in page and requests a specific login.
The 1Password app shows you an approval prompt describing what the agent is asking for and which saved login could help.
You approve or deny the request.
If you approve, 1Password browser extension fills and submits the specific password or one-time code directly into the destination. The agent is signed in and keeps working without seeing the password or the rest of your vault.
1Password for Agents delivers the approved vault login to the 1Password browser extension, so that the agent knows it received permission to sign in. The login remains protected because the agent can't see the underlying password.
Protecting the credential is only part of the problem. When an agent controls a browser, could it also try to interact with other credentials in your 1Password vault?
1Password and the agent app each have a role in protecting your logins. 1Password’s guarantees cover the storage, approval, delivery, and filling of credentials. We provide the agent with the credentials you’ve approved and only on matching pages, submit right away, and clear values from the page if submission fails. After a successful fill, what the agent does on the website is governed by the agent’s own safeguards. The agent developer stores the authorization tokens and integration key for your connection, and their agent controls the environment into which items are filled. All 1Password for Agents providers have signed an agreement to uphold shared security principles with 1Password and passed a security review.
Personal AI agents become more useful when they have more access. They also pose more risk. Using an agent should not require that you let the agent see your bank passwords or any other credentials. This ensures that your plaintext credentials are never kept in the agent’s context or application logs; the agent can’t use or store your passwords or credentials without your oversight.
1Password is extending the security role it has always played for credentials and applying it to personal agents. Your vault remains the source of truth, and you remain the decision-maker. 1Password for Agents gives agents a controlled way to request access and lets them sign in without seeing your credentials or passwords.
You can control what AI agents access and when, without letting them take advantage of your personal information.
Explore the 1Password for Agents security documentation to learn more about how connectors and authorization requests work.