Microsoft Entra Agent ID vs Stytch Connected Apps

Microsoft Entra Agent ID

Agent identities hold no credentials of their own, and Entra refuses high-privilege roles and Graph permissions for them. The token flow is a two-step exchange that Microsoft's own docs call complex and error-prone to implement by hand, and Conditional Access, risk detection and governance for agents need a paid Agent 365 licence.

Stytch Connected Apps

OAuth 2.1 authorisation server with DCR, CIMD and PKCE out of the box. No outbound token vault, so it can't hold your users' third-party tokens.

Microsoft Entra Agent ID

1. Request tokens in two steps. The blueprint gets an exchange token with fmi_path set to the agent identity's client ID, then the agent identity trades it for a resource token
2. Retry with exponential backoff when a create returns 400 Object with id not found straight after creating its parent object
3. Send displayName, agentIdentityBlueprintId and a sponsor reference when creating an agent identity. All three are required
4. Don't use the interactive /authorize flow. Agent identities are confidential clients and can't sign in to a page
5. Keep the sidecar off any public network. Its /AuthorizationHeader endpoint hands out tokens to whoever can reach it

Stytch Connected Apps

1. Fetch {project-domain}/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server first and use the endpoints it returns, not hard-coded paths
2. Register with token_endpoint_auth_method none and PKCE S256 when the agent can't keep a secret
3. Expect a 401 with protected resource metadata from the MCP server, then register and authorise
4. Ask only for scopes the user's roles can grant, or the consent page will refuse them
5. Back off exponentially on a 429, since no Retry-After header is documented