Password managers had to face their first major challenge with the emergence of passkeys. A second one arises today: how to harness the power of personal AI agents if they cannot access the password and username to get through a login page?

Imagine a simple scenario: you instruct your AI agent to book a flight or fill a shopping cart for you, based on criteria you have previously defined. Except that to buy either the plane ticket or the products, you need to… log in to your profile on the airline’s or e-commerce website.

To overcome this hurdle, password manager 1Password has introduced a solution, which was presented on October 22 in a blog post. The company also announced it on X, with a long list of partners: Muse (Meta), Grok Bot (SpaceXSI), Claude Duet (Anthropic), ChatGPT Work and dots (OpenAI), and Perplexity. Only Muse and Grok Bot benefit from it at first, with deployment planned in the coming days. The other integrations have been announced for later, with no date set.

“ Many customers have shared with us their desire to use these new personal AI assistants to become more productive, while also wanting greater control over the data the assistant has access to and enjoying the same level of trust and ease of use,” says 1Password.

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A password filled in, then immediately removed

The challenge, obviously, is to open the digital vault in which the passwords are stored just enough for the AI agent to retrieve only what it needs, without jeopardizing all the other passwords. Above all, the borrowed password must be used only for a specific task, and everything must be erased afterward.

The system designed by 1Password works as follows: when the AI agent arrives at a login page, it identifies itself to the password manager using a unique digital key, to ensure that it is indeed the user’s legitimate tool. The user sees which credential the AI agent is requesting and for what purpose. It is then up to the user to approve or deny it.

If approval is given, 1Password then fills in the login form itself. As soon as the site validates the login, the manager removes the credential. According to the company, the AI agent therefore can neither read nor reuse it. The approval itself is carried out on one of the owner’s authorized devices.

In this setup, 1Password’s vault remains out of the AI agent’s reach. “The agent cannot see the credentials, and the other passwords saved in your vault remain protected by end-to-end encryption,” says the company.However, this is not the case for the account the agent connects to.

Allow the AI agent to access your account

This makes sense. If you ask your AI agent to book a flight and give it access to your airline account so that it can complete the process, the tool will inevitably see the account’s contents and act on them. The risk therefore lies not so much with 1Password, but with the access you grant.

1Password acknowledges this in a FAQ: “An agent may be able to view information or perform actions within the connected account. Its behavior in this context depends on the agent and the website. Review the task and account before granting access.”

The pros and cons therefore need to be weighed carefully, because hiding the password does not prevent an incorrect command or the hijacking of the agent. This is not entirely theoretical: Meta had to urgently patch a vulnerability in Muse in September because it allowed attackers to take control of the agent and all its access.

The service is included at no additional cost in individual and family subscriptions. For now, it only works with accounts hosted on 1Password.com. Accounts linked to European servers (1Password.eu) or Canadian servers (1Password.ca) are not supported, and 1Password has not given any date.

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