On the same day Axios reported that large U.S. banks are finding unauthorized AI agents inside customer accounts, 1Password began rolling out a way for those agents to log in without ever holding a password.
The product, 1Password for Agents, is included at no extra cost for Individual and Family accounts on 1Password.com, the company said in its announcement Thursday morning. Launch partners are Meta’s Muse, Anthropic’s Claude Duet, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work and dots, SpaceXSI’s Grok Bot and Town’s Townie assistant. Not all of them work yet. A 1Password blog post lists Muse and Grok Bot as rolling out over the coming days and marks the Claude Duet, OpenAI and Town connections as coming soon. Accounts hosted on 1Password.eu or 1Password.ca aren’t supported.
What happens at the login screen
When an agent reaches a sign-in form, it identifies itself to 1Password with a unique digital key. The user gets a prompt on their own device showing which credential the agent wants and why. If they approve, 1Password fills the password or one-time code directly into the page, and the agent only learns that access was granted. Once the site accepts the login, 1Password removes the credential “so the agent can’t read or reuse it as it continues the task,” the company says in an FAQ. Access is granted per session and limited to the approved items, Engadget reported.
The habit 1Password is going after is a common one: pasting a password into the agent’s chat window, which SiliconANGLE said leaves a copy saved outside the owner’s control. “The old model where you hand over a credential and hope for the best doesn’t work,” Aashish Tripathi, 1Password’s chief product officer, said in the release.
Banks have a bigger worry
Banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo are moving to contain agent access, and some have blocked third-party agents from their platforms, Engadget wrote in a summary of the Axios report. TechCrunch wrote that the big issue appears to be that most banks can’t tell whether an agent’s activity is tied to a customer’s request. A Chase spokesperson told Axios that customers “should not give their usernames and passwords to anyone.”
1Password’s design keeps the password away from the model, but it doesn’t change the rule at most banks that people log in to their own accounts, as Engadget pointed out. Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster raised the liability question last week when, as WebProNews reported, he told Bloomberg that Schwab stops agents including Muse from moving client funds. “We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, something could go wrong and who’s liable?” he said.
Town co-founder and CEO Jean-Denis Greze pitched the workplace angle, saying that with 1Password “security teams can say yes, and people can hand off more of their work.” 1Password already sells to more than 200,000 businesses, the release says. Parts of the system predate Thursday: SiliconANGLE noted that Claude has worked with 1Password in the browser since July. Anthropic opened its Claude Duet preview on Wednesday.
Nine more companies, among them Perplexity, Ramp and Browserbase, are building their own integrations. 1Password didn’t say when those, or the Claude and OpenAI connections, will reach users.