Who Governs the Machine? A Machine Identity Governance Taxonomy (MIGT) for AI Systems Operating Across Enterprise and Geopolitical Boundaries

arXiv:2604.06148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The governance of artificial intelligence has a blind spot: the machine identities that AI systems use to act. AI agents, service accounts, API tokens, and automated workflows now outnumber human identities in enterprise environments by ratios exceeding 80 to 1, yet no integrated framework exists to govern them. A single ungoverned automated agent produced $5.4-10 billion in losses in the 2024 CrowdStrike outage; nation-state actors including Sil