Delinea, the identity security platform that continuously controls what AI agents, humans and machines can do and for how long, today published new research examining where AI governance breaks down in practice. According to the report, 2026 Identity Security Report: The AI Enforcement Gap, Indian organizations have near-universal AI governance, with 99% of organizations reporting they have a formal policy governing what data AI tools and agents can access. Yet 84% say an AI tool or agent accessed sensitive data beyond its intended scope in the past year.
Governance maturity in India exceeds global levels on most measures. 87% of Indian organizations say their AI data access policy is actively enforced, compared with 71% globally. At the same time, AI tools in India can access far more sensitive data. 76% of Indian organizations say AI tools can reach employee data, compared with 51% globally, and the gap is similar for customer data, financial records and source code. This AI enforcement gap leaves standing access that can lead to AI agent overreach.
“India’s enterprises have done the hard work on AI governance. Almost every organization has a policy, and most enforce it more rigorously than their global peers,” said Cynthia Lee, Vice President, APJ, Delinea. “But AI agents here also reach more customers, employees and financial data than the global average. At that point, a policy alone stops being enough. As DPDP obligations take effect, Indian enterprises will be asked to prove what actually happened: who authorized each access, what the agent did and why it was allowed.”
Key findings from the report include:
- Confidence is running ahead of control: 98% are confident they could demonstrate compliant AI access to a regulator, despite the widespread AI overreach survey respondents reported.
- Standing access hides behind the policy: 99% say they treat AI agent credentials, such as API tokens and MCP configuration files, as governed privileged credentials. Yet 45% say some of those credentials stay active until the next audit, well after the task they were issued for has ended.
- Accountability is thin: Nearly every organization requires a named individual to sign off before AI accesses a new sensitive data source. Yet only 47% can always trace a sensitive AI access event back to that person.
India catches overreach faster, but the execution layer is a blind spot
Indian organizations detect AI overreach faster than their global peers. 34% caught their most recent scope violation as it happened, compared with 20% globally. Nearly half could immediately revoke both an AI tool’s credentials and an active agent session, compared with 35% globally. The gap is in the environments where coding agents do the most work. Only 43% can enforce AI access at the point of action in CI/CD pipelines. Kubernetes is the one environment where India trails the global average.
Closing the gap between policy and enforcement calls for authorizing AI access at the moment of action, not only at login. Delinea applies continuous, runtime authorization with least-privilege scoping and full session visibility across AI, human and machine identities, giving security teams a defensible record of who authorized each access, what the agent did and why it was allowed.