As AI agents become the dominant class of API consumers, PlainID believes standard gateways alone can no longer govern what they access.
PlainID announced it has been named as a Sample Vendor in the API Access Control category in the Gartner report “Hype Cycle for APIs, 2026,” authored by Shameen Pillai and Mark O’Neill and published May 22, 2026.
The 2026 report covers how Generative AI, MCP, and agentic protocols are revolutionizing API creation, management, and security. As AI agents become primary consumers, organizations must embrace contextual docs, federated management, and modern portals leaving legacy tools behind.
At PlainID, we enforce what each agent is permitted to do at runtime, with what scope, in what context, dynamically, at the point of every API call, enforcing zero standing privileges.”
— Gal Helemski, Co-founder and CTO, PlainID
“In our view, what the Gartner Hype Cycle for APIs highlights is not just a change in API tooling, but the shift in who is calling and consuming the APIs. AI agents will gradually become the primary API consumers in many enterprises, acting autonomously, at machine speed, across systems that were never designed with agent authorization in mind. Standard API gateways manage traffic; they were not designed for identity-aware, context-driven access decisions at the moment of access. That gap is exactly where Authorization Management Platforms operate. At PlainID, we enforce what each agent is permitted to do at runtime, with what scope, in what context, dynamically, at the point of every API call, enforcing zero standing privileges.” said Gal Helemski, Co-founder and CTO, PlainID
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According to Gartner, “AI agents and large language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming the dominant class of API consumers.”Gartner adds, “There is a lack of advanced identity and access management (IAM) capabilities delivered with API gateways (e.g., advanced adaptive access and support for evolving identity standards). This has increased demand for specialized access control for APIs delivered by AM, authorization management platforms (AMPs), and other IAM and API security specialist tools.” According to Gartner, “there is a lack of tooling that enables scaling centralized policy authoring and continuous policy life cycle management to an increasingly diverse set of API targets and mediators that enforce these policies.”
PlainID provides centralized policy management with distributed runtime enforcement across human, non-human, and AI agent identities, delivering the IAM depth required for the evolving enterprise landscape. The platform evaluates access decisions using identity, context, and intent at the moment of access, ensuring agent actions are scoped to the task at hand and governed by policy, not by standing credentials. PlainID gives enterprises the centralized policy authoring and continuous lifecycle management required to govern an increasingly diverse set of API targets and enforcement points.
Source: Gartner, “Hype Cycle for APIs, 2026,” Shameen Pillai and Mark O’Neill, May 22, 2026. Gartner and Hype Cycle are a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
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