Postman ships Passport GA so AI agents can call APIs without holding real secrets

Postman announced general availability of Passport by Postman, a standalone API-security product that lets developers, machines, and AI agents discover and call approved APIs without ever holding the real API keys or tokens. Credentials stay self-hosted in the customer environment; callers get cryptographic secret references checked at a customer-deployed proxy (company).

SAFETY desk — same-day company primary that a major API platform put secretless, agent-native API access into GA, aiming at credential sprawl as agents multiply API calls.

Product, as the same wire has it: a standalone API-security product, and the company’s expansion from API tooling into API security. Passport is meant to give organizations a secure way to consume APIs as human and non-human identities — people, machines, and AI agents — work side by side. Secretless here means the caller never holds the real API key or token.

Design, still company: real API credentials stay inside the customer’s own environment and secret store. Callers receive a secret reference — a cryptographic pointer that does nothing without the customer-deployed proxy, and is bound to the identity that requested it. Cryptographic here means a math-backed token, not a shared password copied into a file. The company contrasts that with traditional API-key management and gateway approaches that focus on distributing and protecting secrets.

Controls named on the same wire, company: grant permission down to the exact action, host, and path; every request is checked against those rules before it reaches the vault; revoke access in seconds; full attribution for every call.

Agents, still company: developers and agents are treated identically. Agents receive ephemeral, task-scoped identities minted from a durable parent, so a fleet of agents can run without distributing long-lived secrets. Ephemeral means short-lived and thrown away after the job. A durable parent is the longer-lived identity those short-lived ones are minted from. Sub-agents inherit only a subset of the parent’s permissions.

Problem framing, as Postman tells it: developers and AI agents need to call APIs constantly, but the keys and tokens that authenticate those calls are hard to control once they land on a machine. A real credential can spread across.env files, repositories, chat tools, IDE configurations, and CI logs, making it difficult to audit. A single leaked credential can be used thousands of times before anyone catches it, and the company says AI agents may call APIs at about 1,000 times the rate humans do.

Named voice on the release: Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman. He says AI agents get their abilities through APIs, and that as developers and agents multiply the number of calls, the number of credentials in circulation grows just as quickly. His other quotes are color only and stay in Sources.

Availability, company: Passport is available now. The wire points readers to http://usepassport.ai/. The release does not print a price. An earlier June 2026 Postman blog introduced Passport and asked readers to register for access — use that post for architecture, not as the GA date. Today’s Business Wire is the GA record.

Architecture color from that earlier company blog — HOW, not today’s dateline: consumers get credential references instead of real keys; API calls route through a Secure Access Proxy the customer deploys in their own network or VPC; the proxy resolves the reference and injects the real key inside that boundary; the company says the resolved secret never reaches Postman, logs, or audit records. A VPC is a virtual private cloud — a private slice of a public cloud.

About-box context, optional and company-attributed: Postman says it is trusted by more than 40 million developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Bangalore, Boston, New York City, and Tokyo. Privately held.

Plain English for the rest of the card: secretless = the agent never sees the real API key. proxy = a component in the customer’s own cloud that swaps a safe reference for the real key only at call time. GA = generally available, offered for production use. secret reference = a cryptographic pointer that is useless without the proxy. ephemeral identity = a short-lived agent identity minted for one task. durable parent = the longer-lived identity those short-lived ones come from. VPC = virtual private cloud, a private slice of a public cloud. agent sprawl = agents multiplying faster than anyone can see, govern, or shut down. API = application programming interface, the machine-to-machine doors an app exposes.