API Security Trends 2026

Looking back at Nordic API’s Platform Summit that took place last October, 2025 was the year of AI and MCP. Both will remain hot topics to a great extent even in 2026, and they already bring some good changes as they are forcing organizations to rethink their IAM strategies, alter their frames of mind, and improve security. 

AI will continue to drive IAM in 2026. I'm convinced that its impact on authorization will be long-lasting. With that in mind, I believe 2026 holds some exciting trends worth watching.

Machine Identities Will Take Center Stage

In the context of AI and autonomous applications, it will become increasingly important to authenticate and authorize machines, AI agents, and their human operators, if any. Consequently, machine IAM will get quite some attention in 2026. Questions like how to trust arbitrary applications whose code organizations can't control, how to onboard them, and how to authorize requests will be hot topics.

Simply strengthening machine identities will not be enough. AI demands speed and dynamics in authorization decisions - particularly for applications. Authorization will need to be fast and secure. 

Access Control Will Concentrate on Speed

Conventional Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions struggle to meet modern requirements for provisioning access for machines or applications in a timely manner. IAM simply cannot rely anymore on processes with manual steps and approvals, where it may take weeks to onboard applications and provision access. Autonomous applications require autonomous decisions. 

Admin-time authorization will need to focus on setting up the trust and defining the rules for how to retrieve permissions for applications and users dynamically during runtime. Runtime authorization will need to continuously evaluate permissions. 

Permissions can change quickly depending on events at other parts of a system architecture. Therefore, analysing and sharing data and signals between components will be important for the success of IAM. This is a great chance for the adoption of certain standards. 

OAuth Integrations Will Mature

Along with the focus on machine identities, more organizations will start to strengthen OAuth client credentials. More organizations will utilize their infrastructure, such as workload identities for client authentication. However, as with usernames and passwords for humans, it will take decades to get rid of client secrets or their equivalent to authenticate applications. At least, 2026 will spark off some initiatives in the right direction. With MCP dictating an OAuth profile, organizations will become more aware of the best practices. In 2026, OAuth integrations will improve beyond strong client credentials: More organizations will make use of token exchange for least privileged access and of the JWT-assertion-grant protocol to cross security boundaries. How to enable Single Sign-On for users across trust domains and federate authorization without compromising security is one of the challenges to solve in 2026.

While AI and the resulting requirements will dominate IAM to a great extent, some regulations, namely eIDAS and PSD3, will also have an impact during 2026.

Verifiable Credentials Will Begin to Shine 

There is quite some work happening in the European Union for the rollout of Verifiable Credentials and a European Identity Wallet. As the deadline is getting closer and the results get more and more reliable in 2026, organizations that are far-sighted will prepare for the change. Verifiable Credentials enable a new, convenient, and cheap method for identity verification and authentication for a large part of the population in Europe. 2026 is the year when things will start to feel real.

Open Finance Will Disrupt the Finance Sector 

As with PSD2, which created quite some excitement and anxiety in the banking sector, PSD3, PSR, and FIDA will have a similar impact on more actors in the financial industry. It's likely that the regulations will be finalized during the first half of 2026. So, 2026 is the time to have a closer look and prepare for the impact.  The regulations promise more harmonization and stronger customer protection. Among other things, PSD3 strengthens Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). For example, SCA implementations also need to be accessible to all users, including people with disabilities, elderly people, or people with less technical skills. Sounds good and human in my opinion.

Weak API Security Will Continue

Companies will continue to make mistakes because there will still be gaps in the understanding between infrastructure teams, application developers, API developers, and the business. Such misunderstandings, together with other implementation flaws, represent the main threat to API access control. The increase in automated API attacks that target broken authorization adds to the risk. Consequently, broken authorization is the area where most exploits will occur. 

Organizations need to proactively improve their API security implementations to avoid broken authorizations from the beginning. The ability to communicate and convey business requirements, and translate them into technical implementations while providing seamless user experience (including developer experience) and keeping up with security will remain important for the success of an IAM program. 

Refine Your API Security in 2026

IAM for APIs and API clients remains a complex topic. In fact, the trend is towards more complexity, which requires more sophisticated building blocks such as non-human identities. The best practices for API access control and AI agents are going to be more relevant than ever in 2026. I believe that the new year will bring some exciting improvements regarding IAM. Who knows, maybe 2026 is the year that will rewrite the list of top API vulnerabilities and contain fewer authorization problems?!