1Password Taps Nancy Wang as CTO to Tackle AI's Identity Crisis

TORONTO, ON – January 12, 2026 – In a significant move to address the burgeoning security challenges of artificial intelligence, identity security leader 1Password today announced the appointment of Nancy Wang as its new Chief Technology Officer. Wang, a seasoned technology executive with deep experience at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rubrik, will lead the company’s global engineering organization and spearhead its AI strategy, a role that positions 1Password at the forefront of securing a new, non-human workforce of AI agents.

The appointment signals a critical pivot for the cybersecurity industry, moving beyond the familiar terrain of human user credentials to confront the complex and rapidly expanding world of non-human identities. As organizations increasingly deploy autonomous AI systems, the very definition of identity is being rewritten, creating an urgent need for a new security paradigm.

A New Class of Identity

The core of the challenge lies in the fundamental differences between human and machine behavior. Legacy identity and access management (IAM) systems were built for people, who typically perform tasks in predictable, interactive workflows. AI agents, however, operate differently. Their workflows are often non-deterministic and continuous, relying on a vast and growing number of machine-to-machine credentials like API keys, access tokens, and secrets.

“AI introduces a new class of identity, one that doesn’t behave like a human and therefore must be governed differently from humans,” said Nancy Wang in the official announcement. This new class of non-human identities (NHIs) is proliferating at an exponential rate, with some industry estimates suggesting they already outnumber human employees by three to five times in many organizations. This explosion creates a massive, often unmonitored, attack surface.

Industry analysts are sounding the alarm. Gartner has identified AI security as a top trend, predicting that 33% of enterprises will incorporate agentic AI into their applications by 2028, a dramatic leap from less than 1% in 2024. This rapid adoption, however, comes with severe risks. Security experts warn that the first major AI-related breaches will likely involve compromised agent credentials, which can grant attackers broad, persistent access across corporate systems without the need for human interaction.

An Architect for the AI Era

To navigate this complex new landscape, 1Password has brought in a leader with a proven track record of building and scaling enterprise-grade security platforms. Nancy Wang’s resume speaks to the scale of the challenge. She previously served as General Manager and Director of Engineering and Product for AWS’s Data Protection business, where she was instrumental in growing the portfolio to over 160,000 enterprise customers and protecting more than two exabytes of data.

Before her tenure at AWS, Wang was a founding product manager at the cloud data security company Rubrik, helping to shape its early strategy. Her influence extends beyond corporate roles; she is also a Venture Partner at Felicis Ventures and the founder of Advancing Women in Tech (AWIT), a global nonprofit focused on AI literacy and skills training.

“As AI moves from experimentation to real-world deployment, identity security has to evolve just as quickly,” said David Faugno, CEO of 1Password. “Nancy’s appointment as CTO reflects our commitment to innovation in this area. Her experience building and scaling security platforms will help us continue delivering the solutions our customers need as AI becomes part of everyday work.”

Building the 'Durable Trust Layer'

1Password’s strategy centers on creating what Wang calls a “durable trust layer to govern access across human and non-human workflows.” This involves embedding identity security directly into the tools and platforms where AI agents operate, making the secure path the easiest one. The company has already rolled out several key integrations that showcase this approach in action.

For developers working with AI-powered code editors like Cursor, 1Password provides just-in-time access to secrets, ensuring credentials are only made available at runtime and never hardcoded or left lingering in source code. Similarly, a new integration with AWS Secrets Manager allows for seamless synchronization of credentials between local developer environments and the cloud, providing end-to-end visibility and reducing the risk of secrets sprawl.

Perhaps most illustrative of the new paradigm is the company's partnership with Browserbase, a cloud browser automation platform. The collaboration introduces “Secure Agentic Autofill,” a feature that allows an AI agent to log into a web service on a user's behalf. Crucially, the credentials are injected just-in-time after human approval and are never exposed to the Large Language Model (LLM) itself, creating a vital human-in-the-loop checkpoint. This model is also extended to AI-powered browsers, with official support for managing credentials in OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity's Comet, ensuring user privacy is maintained.

The Emerging Competitive Frontier

1Password's strategic focus on agentic AI security places it in an emerging but fiercely competitive arena. Other major IAM vendors are also racing to address the non-human identity problem. CyberArk, for instance, has launched its own “Secure AI Agents Solution,” aiming to discover, manage, and apply privilege controls to AI agent identities. The consensus is that the old concept of a defensible “identity perimeter” is obsolete in an age of autonomous agents and AI-generated phishing attacks.

For enterprises, the stakes are enormous. The World Economic Forum has highlighted how NHIs created by agentic AI vastly increase an organization's attack surface. Without a reliable way to manage and secure these identities, the widespread adoption of transformative AI technologies could be stalled by unacceptable levels of risk and compliance failures. The development of a robust trust layer is therefore not just a technical requirement but a critical business enabler.

By appointing a CTO with deep expertise in scaling security for modern infrastructure, 1Password is making a clear statement about its intention to lead this next phase of identity security. The mission is to build solutions that can secure a future where autonomous agents work alongside humans, extending the company’s human-centric design philosophy to a world of non-human workers. Ultimately, the successful and safe integration of AI into the fabric of everyday work will depend on the very trust and security that this new generation of technology aims to provide.