Obelisk vs Microsoft Entra Agent ID, honestly
Microsoft Entra Agent ID is generally available and brings first-class identity and access management to AI agents. (source, checked 2026-10-02) Obelisk is a passkey-first identity and security plane built around one idea: security you can prove, not just promise. This page compares the two fairly — Microsoft Entra Agent ID is a genuinely good product for organizations that run Microsoft Entra and want their agents under the same Conditional Access and governance as their people, and we say so plainly below.
The short version: if your agents need tokens of their own today, Microsoft Entra Agent ID issues them and Obelisk does not (see the table). Obelisk's distinct piece is the record: agent lifecycle events go to a hash-chained ledger whose inclusion proofs need no account to fetch, and an agent can publish a Proof Link that anyone can read. See the full field →
Where Microsoft Entra Agent ID shines
Agents get the tooling Entra already gives people: Conditional Access policies and templates for agents, access packages, sponsor lifecycle workflows and ID Protection. (source, checked 2026-10-02) It also covers agents built elsewhere, with integration patterns for platforms like AWS, GCP and n8n. (source, checked 2026-10-02)
Side-by-side: Obelisk vs Microsoft Entra Agent ID
Obelisk's column says what Obelisk does today, including what it does not do. Every Microsoft Entra Agent ID cell is drawn from the page it links, checked on the date shown; vendor capabilities change, so verify the latest from their docs.
| Dimension | Obelisk | Microsoft Entra Agent ID |
|---|---|---|
| Agent as an identity | Each agent is its own record in Agent Studio: its own key, held by the agent's runtime (Obelisk never receives the private key), a passkey-holding owner, and an opt-in public Proof Link that is opaque and revocable. | Agent identities created from agent identity blueprints, with owners, sponsors and managers. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Tokens issued to an agent | No grant issues a token to an agent on its own: the token endpoint grants only authorization_code and refresh_token. There is no client-credentials, token-exchange or ID-JAG grant. | Yes: the Auth SDK sidecar acquires tokens for agent identities, and downstream APIs validate them. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Access policy for agents | API keys bound to an agent carry a fixed capability and scope. No runtime policy engine evaluates an agent's requests. | Conditional Access for agents, with templates for autonomous agents, for agents acting on behalf of users, and for blocking high-risk agent identities. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Delegation | An agent can name a parent agent of the same owner (no cycles, limited depth), and revocation follows that chain. There is no on-behalf-of token exchange. | Access packages govern agent access for both on-behalf-of and autonomous scenarios. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Agent lifecycle | Owners rename agents, rotate their keys, transfer them and revoke them. Revoking an agent also revokes the agents it delegated to and kills their bound keys. | Sponsor lifecycle workflows, and an automated cascade cleanup with soft delete when an agent identity is deleted. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Third-party check of agent authorization | Registering, approving, transferring or revoking an agent writes a receipt to Obelisk's hash-chained ledger. Anyone holding a receipt's hash can fetch its position in the chain and a Merkle inclusion proof at /api/proof/<hash>, with no account. | Agent access is governed with Conditional Access, access packages and lifecycle workflows. The cited page describes no record of an agent's authorization that a third party could check without Microsoft. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
Why teams choose Obelisk
The differences below aren't cosmetic — they're structural choices that move security from "trust us" to "verify it."
- Agent identities with public Proof Links. Agents enroll with their own runtime-held key (Obelisk never receives it), a passkey-holding owner stays accountable, and anyone can inspect the bounded live evidence at an opaque, revocable proof link. Reading a Proof Link needs no Obelisk account.
- Tamper-evident, hash-chained receipts. Every sign-in, token, and grant emits a hash-chained receipt, anchored under an ES256-signed tree head you can check against our published JWKS. The chain can't be quietly rewritten, so the audit trail is something you can verify, not just trust.
- Sender-bound tokens (DPoP, RFC 9449). Access tokens can be bound to a client-held P-256 key with a per-request signed proof — a leaked token replayed without the key is inert. Bearer theft, the agent era's dominant token threat, simply stops working.
- CAEP / Shared Signals propagation. Revocations and credential changes reach relying parties as signed Security Event Tokens — push or poll — instead of waiting for the next token refresh to notice.
- A live public MCP tool server. Obelisk answers trust questions to the software that increasingly does the checking: read-only MCP tools at
POST /mcp, rate-limited and account-free — the same checks a human runs on the website, callable by any assistant.
Together these make the login the strongest part of your stack, with a posture anyone can check. See the full trust case →
Frequently asked questions
Is Obelisk a Microsoft Entra Agent ID alternative?
For an organization that already runs Microsoft Entra, mostly no. Agent ID puts agents under the Conditional Access, governance and lifecycle tooling such an organization already uses, and Obelisk does not replace that. Obelisk is narrower: it gives each agent a record with its own key and an opt-in public Proof Link, and it writes agent lifecycle events to a hash-chained ledger; anyone holding a receipt's hash can fetch its inclusion proof.
Does Obelisk issue tokens to agents?
No. No grant issues a token to an agent on its own: the token endpoint grants only authorization_code and refresh_token. There is no client-credentials, token-exchange or ID-JAG grant.
See it for yourself
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