Okta for AI Agents vs SSOGEN: What Each Product Documents

SSOGEN controls each AI agent from registration to shutdown.

• Identity. Each agent is registered with a name, a permanent identifier, a type, one to five human owners (people, never groups) and one primary owner. It is saved as Pending and can do nothing until an administrator activates it. If its last owner leaves, it is suspended.
• Keys, not passwords. The agent proves itself with a key pair. SSOGEN refuses any registration that contains a private key. Tokens are bound to the agent’s key through DPoP. They last about four minutes, 270 seconds at most.
• Two modes. An agent can act on its own or act for a person. Acting for a person needs the person’s consent, on a screen that shows the agent’s owner, the scopes and the duration. A delegation lasts 30 days at most, and the person can withdraw it.
• MCP. The MCP Gateway, a capability of the SSOGEN Gateway that runs in your network, sits in front of your MCP server and checks each tool call against the scopes granted. Scopes marked Sensitive need the person’s approval every time.
• Stopping agents. Suspend one agent, revoke one delegation, or flip a kill switch for a whole type. New tokens stop at once. Tokens already issued stop within five minutes.
• Audit. Every decision, allowed or refused, is recorded with the agent, the person, the scope and the tool name.

SSOGEN is also a complete identity provider, so the same product handles people’s sign-in. Details are on AI agent identity and in the MCP authorization guide.

Cross App Access is Okta’s name for letting one app call another app’s API for a signed-in user, with the identity provider in the middle. All of this section comes from Okta’s own pages, read 2026-10-09.

What Okta says it is

Okta’s concepts page says “Cross App Access (XAA) provides a low-friction mechanism for an app to establish secure connections with a third-party resource server” and names the problem it targets: “Static API keys lack end-user context, and grant overly broad permissions. Direct app-to-app OAuth flows operate outside central identity governance” (Cross App Access (XAA)).

Okta names four parts:

• Requesting app. The app that needs access.
• Resource app. The app that holds the API.
• IdP. It issues an ID-JAG token.
• Resource authorization server. It checks the token and issues a short-lived, scoped access token.

Okta recommends OpenID Connect for new integrations. SAML 2.0 is supported for existing federations.

Okta says XAA “provides centralized governance, unified policy enforcement, and audit logging for every XAA request” and “integrates directly with AI agent frameworks and server standards, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP)”.

How an admin sets it up

Okta’s help page calls XAA “a protocol that simplifies how third-party apps share data, moving complex consent processes away from end users and into the Okta Admin Console”.

• Admin Console. Admins manage the connections between a requesting app and a resource app.
• Subscription. The org must be subscribed to the Single Sign-On product (Configure Cross App Access).
• Agents. Okta’s blog ties it to agents. XAA uses the Identity Assertion Authorization Grant, and both the human and the agent travel in the token (blog above).

What SSOGEN does for the same job

An agent acting for a person follows these steps:

1. The agent starts at a consent screen.
2. The person sees the agent’s owner, the scopes and the duration.
3. The approval is a delegation of 30 days at most. The person or an administrator can end it.
4. Administrators separately choose which apps and scopes each agent may reach.

For the delegated case, SSOGEN’s AI agent identity page lists OAuth token exchange (RFC 8693), explained in OAuth token exchange.

In SSOGEN, the person’s consent always stands. An administrator’s approval never replaces it for an agent acting for that person, so no agent works for someone who did not agree.

Reading the difference

They answer different questions.

• Okta’s XAA is about app-to-app connections an admin approves in advance, so end users are not asked to consent app by app. Okta documents this for agents that mostly call third-party SaaS apps that support XAA.
• SSOGEN’s delegation asks the person, then checks each call at the gateway. It is built for tools that sit in your own network behind an MCP server, where SSOGEN checks every call. The Okta pages we read do not say how XAA applies to such tools.

SSOGEN fits when these describe you:

• Tools in your network. The tools your agents call live in your own network, like an Oracle E-Business Suite behind an MCP server, and you want the checkpoint there too.
• Key-bound calls. You want every MCP call tied to a key the agent holds, with plain bearer tokens refused.
• One product. You need one product for people’s sign-in to ERP and web apps, and for agent identity.
• Tool approval. You want a person’s approval on specific tools, enforced on every call, with a record that names the tool.
• Consent. You want no agent acting for a person without that person’s own consent.