AI Agents Require 'Passports' for Accountability, Says JioHotstar CISO, ETCISO

TEXT START: Speaking during the “CISO Spotlight: My Big Win in 9 Minutes” session at the 9th ETCISO Annual Conclave 2026, Mohd. Shadab Siddiqui, CISO, JioHotstar, argued that enterprises must govern AI agents and other “machine workers” with clearly defined mandates, ownership, privileges, lifecycles and accountability.

1. The Dissection

This is not mainly a security story. It is an institutional adaptation memo for the moment enterprises discover that their “employees” are nonhuman, persistent, permissioned, self-propagating and potentially harder to terminate than the people whose authorities they inherit.

The passport proposal packages five controls—mandate, authority, custodian, memory and mortality—into a legal-technical identity record. Its function is to convert autonomous machine activity into something audit, risk, security and compliance departments can map. Lineage, bound tokens, short-lived credentials and kill rights are containment mechanisms. They are useful. They are also an admission that authority is moving into a layer humans do not naturally control.

The “second workforce” phrase is the ideological hinge. It normalizes machines as laboring actors while preserving the fiction that the institution remains human-led. Humans are recast as owners, supervisors, validators, custodians and incident responders. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, that is the Servitor tier forming around AI capital; the owners of the infrastructure and decision rights are the Sovereigns.

2. The Core Fallacy

It mistakes traceability for accountability and governance for control.

A passport can identify the custodian after a failure. It cannot guarantee that the custodian understood the agent’s emergent behavior, that the mandate remained bounded, that descendants obeyed inherited limits, or that a decision can be reversed once executed across a live system. A complete log is an autopsy record, not a steering wheel. Naming an owner can allocate liability without restoring human command.

The deeper fallacy is economic. The proposal treats the problem as a missing identity-and-access layer, while the Discontinuity Thesis identifies the destruction of the mass employment → wage → consumption circuit. Better machine governance may make displacement safer, faster and more scalable. It does not preserve productive participation. The passport is a seat belt for a vehicle whose destination is still system replacement.

3. Hidden Assumptions

• A human custodian retains effective authority over every agent and descendant, including agents that create other agents.
• Mandates can be written narrowly enough to constrain systems operating in changing and ambiguous environments.
• Identity, lineage, memory, logs and authorization state remain complete, accurate and tamper-resistant during an incident.
• “Mortality” is enforceable: all copies, tokens, cached credentials, child agents and external effects can actually be terminated.
• Least-privilege controls will not make agents too weak to produce the efficiency gains that motivate deployment.
• Human review and validation can scale as machine workers multiply and operate continuously.
• Assigning accountability to a person creates meaningful accountability rather than merely a convenient target for legal or reputational blame.
• Institutions can coordinate these rules quickly enough to prevent privilege sprawl and competitive races to deploy.
• Keeping humans in the loop preserves human economic necessity. It may instead preserve a thin supervisory layer while the underlying work disappears.
• Security’s kill authority will survive commercial pressure to keep productive agents running. In practice, the owner of AI capital controls the shutdown threshold.

4. Social Function

Primary classification: partial truth and transition management. Secondary classifications: elite self-exoneration and ideological anesthetic.

The technical warning is valid: machine identities need explicit ownership, scoped authority, lineage, bounded memory, expiry and kill controls. Ignoring that would create operational chaos and security exposure.

But the framing performs managerial laundering. It turns labor substitution into an identity-governance project. The institution can claim responsibility is being preserved because every agent has a passport, while the economic fact is that responsibility and participation are diverging: machines execute, a small ownership class captures the productive leverage, and humans are assigned residual oversight. The vocabulary of “second workforce” makes replacement sound like workforce administration. It is transition management for an incoming machine economy, not a defense of the outgoing one.

5. The Verdict

The passport is a real containment instrument and a clear signal that autonomous systems are becoming a parallel labor force. It can reduce blast radius, expose ownership gaps and preserve a kill path. It cannot solve P1, P2 or P3.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, this is not evidence that post-WWII capitalism can absorb AI agents. It is evidence that institutions are building paperwork, lineage graphs and emergency brakes around the machinery that will make mass human labor economically optional. The passport assigns a name to the machine. It does not give the displaced majority a claim on the machine’s output.