IBM Agent Identity with HashiCorp Vault 2.2 and watsonx Orchestrate agent containment

A dated reading of what is claimed, reported, and independently verified in the current evidence.

Current reading

Readiness band and full integer triple

AI-assisted assembly · derived results

Readiness band

Ready

Primary summary from verified readiness

Evidence strength Critical

Decision

Human editorial judgment · 2026-10-29

Proceed with caution

Why: The credential and registry layer is genuinely shipped: Agent Identity is GA, Vault 2.2.0 shipped 2026-10-15 with ML-DSA in the PKI engine, and Vault's Agentic IAM (agent registration, ceiling policies) left beta in Vault Enterprise 2.1.0 (2026-09-01). The differentiating pieces for blast-radius control (Discover, Contain, kill switch) are tech preview, with no rollback, no pricing, and no named production customer. Futurum judges runtime authorization the harder problem for the whole category and the sandbox more important than the kill switch. That supports tracking and piloting the identity layer but not relying on the containment layer yet.
Next: Pilot Agent Identity plus Vault 2.2 agent registry and short-lived credentials on a non-critical agent workload; keep independent emergency stops (revocable credentials, feature flags, rate limits) and re-evaluate when Orchestrate Contain reaches GA and IBM publishes pricing and a named production reference.

Constraints

No named blocker is present in the current public projection.

Evidence summary

AI-assisted assembly

Counts and dates only. Raw signals, private excerpts, trust records, and internal corpus material are not published here.

Publication record

Initial public reading