OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant that has gone viral and represents a paradigm shift in personal productivity. It can read email, manage calendars, execute commands, and take autonomous action on your behalf—all while you sleep. But as organizations and individuals rush to deploy these powerful agents, a critical governance gap has emerged: most users are treating OpenClaw like software when they should be treating it like an employee.
Security researchers have sounded alarms about what they're finding in the wild. This includes documented incidents of plaintext API keys, Telegram bot tokens, and Slack OAuth credentials exposed in OpenClaw instances reachable from the public internet. Researchers even discovered deployments leaking entire conversation histories alongside signing secrets.
The root cause? Users are handing over their credentials directly to an autonomous agent with no governance layer, no access controls, and no audit trail.
Consider what a typical OpenClaw deployment has access to:
Email accounts with OAuth tokens that never expire
Cloud storage containing sensitive documents
Messaging platforms where confidential conversations occur
Shell access to execute arbitrary commands
Browser control to navigate authenticated sessions
When users configure OpenClaw by pasting their personal API keys into local configuration files, they're essentially giving an autonomous system the keys to their digital kingdom—with no way to revoke access granularly, no visibility into what the agent does with those credentials, and no separation between personal and organizational resources.
The solution isn't to avoid autonomous AI agents—their productivity benefits are too significant to ignore—but so is their peril. The solution is to govern them using the same identity and access management principles we apply to human employees.
Every AI agent deployment should have a human sponsor—a steward who is accountable for that agent's actions. This isn't a technical implementation detail; it's an organizational governance requirement. When an employee joins an organization, we don't hand them a sticky note with the CEO's password. We create a distinct identity, assign appropriate access levels, and establish accountability through a reporting structure. AI agents deserve no less.
A sponsored identity model means:
The agent has its own credentials, separate from any human user
Access can be revoked instantly without affecting human accounts
Audit logs clearly attribute actions to the agent identity
The sponsor receives notifications about the agent's activities
Policy violations trigger alerts to both security teams and sponsors
One of the most dangerous patterns emerging in OpenClaw deployments is credential sprawl—users connecting their agent to every service imaginable "just in case" it needs access.
Purpose-built IAM platforms enable precise access scoping:
Time-bound access that expires and requires renewal
Action-specific permissions (read email vs. send email vs. delete email)
Resource boundaries limiting which mailboxes, folders, or documents are accessible
Contextual access policies that consider time, location, and behavioral patterns
In most cases, these controls already exist in the form of group and attribute-based access
controls that can be driven by a robust IAM platform.
Human employees undergo periodic access reviews. Their managers attest that they still need the access they have, and dormant permissions get revoked. AI agents should face the same scrutiny.
An IAM-governed agent deployment includes:
Real-time activity logging with tamper-evident audit trails
Behavioral baselines that detect anomalous access patterns
Periodic access certification requiring sponsor attestation
Automated access revocation for dormant or suspicious agents
Perhaps the most critical lesson from early OpenClaw deployments: never store credentials in local configuration files accessible to the agent itself.
Modern credential management for AI agents requires:
Secrets management platforms (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Bitwarden, enterprise password managers) that inject credentials at runtime
Short-lived tokens that minimize the blast radius of credential theft
Credential rotation policies that automatically refresh secrets on a schedule
A practical implementation: give your OpenClaw instance its own password manager account within your organization's governance structure. The agent can access the credentials it needs, but those credentials are managed, audited, and revocable through your existing IAM infrastructure.