Comparison
Agentic Fabric governs who AI agents are. PlainID controls what they can access, do, and expose at the moment of every action. These are not the same problem — and in agentic AI, both must be solved.
Where the gap shows up
Every scenario below starts with a correctly governed agent. The risk happens after governance is done.
Scenario 01
Your AI agent is correctly provisioned in SailPoint. It has access to the enterprise knowledge base. During one session, it retrieves 10,000 customer records to answer a single query.
Agentic Fabric: confirms the entitlement was correct. The access was legitimate.
PlainID: evaluates the retrieval at the moment it occurs, detects scope exceeds stated purpose, and blocks the response before data leaves.
Scenario 02
A mid-level employee launches an AI agent for financial analysis. Operating autonomously, the agent makes API calls touching data classifications above the user's clearance level.
Agentic Fabric: recorded the ownership link — agent belongs to human. That record does not stop the action.
PlainID: binds the user's role, clearance, and purpose into every authorization decision the agent makes in real time.
Scenario 03
An orchestrator spawns three sub-agents dynamically: one retrieves from a RAG store, one calls an API via MCP, one writes results to a database. None were pre-registered.
Agentic Fabric: governed the orchestrator. The sub-agents, created on the fly, may not appear in its inventory.
PlainID: enforces authorization at every tool call, MCP invocation, and write — including agents spawned dynamically at runtime.
Every verdict below carries a written reason — so it holds up whether a person reads it or a security architect walks it to a CISO.
Full coverage: At the moment of action
Every authorization decision is evaluated at execution time — not at provisioning time. No time window of open access.
Gap / limitation: Not included
Agentic Fabric manages provisioned entitlements. It does not evaluate individual actions at execution time based on live context.
Full coverage: Per-action enforcement
Access is never pre-granted. Every individual action is evaluated and approved or denied at the moment it occurs.
Partial coverage: JIT provisioning (Plus tier only)
Zero-standing privilege is available via just-in-time access grants that are revoked on a schedule — not enforced at the individual action level.
Full coverage: Row, column, and field-level filtering
Fine-grained controls applied at the data platform layer (Databricks, Redshift, Snowflake) at the moment of retrieval, before data enters the AI pipeline.
Gap / limitation: Not included
Agentic Fabric maps relationships to data assets but does not enforce granular access controls at the data platform layer.
Full coverage: Enforced at execution time
Human identity context — role, clearance, purpose — is injected into every decision the agent makes. The agent cannot exceed what the human is permitted to do.
Partial coverage: Governance record only
Agents are linked to human owners for governance and accountability. That ownership record is not enforced as a runtime constraint on individual actions.
Full coverage: Every step enforced
Prompt intake, data retrieval (RAG), tool and MCP server calls, and output delivery — every node in the agentic flow is covered.
Gap / limitation: Not included
Agentic Fabric governs the agent identity, not the individual actions and decisions within the agent's execution flow.
Full coverage: Includes dynamically spawned agents
Enforces on all agents, including those created at runtime — not just those pre-registered in an inventory.
Partial coverage: Inventory-based
Coverage depends on agents being discovered and registered. Dynamically spawned sub-agents may not appear in the governance inventory.
Full coverage: Full explainability per action
Every authorization call is logged, contextualized, and human-readable — including the policies evaluated and the contextual factors considered.
Partial coverage: Lifecycle event tracking
Agentic Fabric logs lifecycle events and access certifications. It does not produce per-decision audit trails for individual agent actions.
Partial coverage: Focused on enforcement
PlainID enforces authorization on known and dynamic agents but is not the primary system of record for agent identity and lifecycle.
Full coverage: Core capability
SailPoint discovers AI agents, maps ownership, manages access certifications and lifecycle, and surfaces shadow AI. This is Agentic Fabric's primary function.
Full coverage: Production-ready today
Trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises in financial services, pharmaceutical, aerospace, and regulated industries. Millions of decisions processed daily.
Partial coverage: Available summer 2026
Announced May 11, 2026. Verify current availability at the time of evaluation.
These are not competing choices. Most enterprises in regulated industries need both. Here is what each one actually solves.
AI agent identity governance and lifecycle
PlainID control plane
Policy & control plane (PlainID)
50%+
Of successful cybersecurity attacks against AI agents will exploit access control issues through 2029 — Gartner, "How to Secure Custom-Built AI Agents," 11 June 2025
2B+
Authorization decisions processed annually, built for high-scale, real-time enforcement across complex environments
F500
Fortune 500 enterprises trust PlainID to secure millions of identities, recognized by Gartner and KuppingerCole in authorization and security platforms
How they work together
SailPoint manages the identity lifecycle. PlainID enforces authorization at runtime. Used together, they cover the full security requirement for agentic AI.
SailPoint
SailPoint's Agentic Fabric discovers every AI agent in your environment, assigns ownership, manages access certifications, and ensures entitlements comply with least-privilege policy. Every agent is accounted for. Every entitlement is governed.
PlainID
At every action an agent attempts — a query, a tool call, an API invocation, a data retrieval — PlainID evaluates whether that specific action is permitted, using live context: user identity, agent scope, data sensitivity, session state, and regulatory constraints. The decision fires in milliseconds.
Together
Every governance record in SailPoint has a corresponding enforcement trail in PlainID. Regulators get a complete picture: who the agent was, who owned it, what it was provisioned to access, and whether every individual action it took was explicitly authorized.
Comparison
Runtime authorization vs. AI-native security tooling.
Platform
Discover, manage, and authorize across human, machine, and AI agent identities.
Resource
Design principles for securing autonomous AI systems at enterprise scale.
No. PlainID and SailPoint solve different problems and are designed to work together. SailPoint governs who AI agents are, who owns them, and what they are provisioned to access. PlainID enforces whether each specific action is permitted at the exact moment it occurs. Enterprises in regulated industries typically need both layers.
Agentic Fabric is the authoritative identity governance layer for AI agents: it discovers agent inventory, assigns ownership, manages access lifecycle and certifications, and surfaces shadow AI. PlainID focuses on runtime enforcement, not identity governance. For organizations that already use SailPoint, Agentic Fabric is the natural extension of their IGA stack into the AI agent layer.
PlainID enforces authorization at the moment of every action — evaluating whether a specific query, tool call, MCP invocation, or data retrieval is permitted based on live context at execution time. It also enforces at the data layer (row, column, and field-level filtering), covers dynamically spawned agents at runtime, binds human identity context into every agent decision, and produces per-decision audit trails with full explainability. None of these are capabilities Agentic Fabric provides.
Yes. PlainID is designed as an additive enforcement layer, not a replacement for your existing identity stack. It works alongside SailPoint — SailPoint governs the agent identity and entitlements; PlainID enforces that those entitlements are exercised correctly at runtime. You do not need to replace or migrate from SailPoint to deploy PlainID.
SailPoint announced Agentic Fabric on May 11, 2026, with availability targeted for summer 2026. PlainID is production-ready today, trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises in financial services, pharmaceutical, aerospace, and regulated industries. Verify Agentic Fabric's current availability at the time of your evaluation.
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