Ory and Cockroach Labs Partner to Manage Identity Across Humans, Services and Autonomous Agents, Including MCP and A2A

Ory Corp., the modern choice for Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), and Cockroach Labs, a pioneer in cloud-native distributed SQL databases with CockroachDB, today announced an expanded partnership to solve one of the most pressing infrastructure problems of the AI era: managing identity across humans, services, and autonomous agents at global scale. The collaboration helps enterprises adopt modern IAM architecture that’s flexible enough to support standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent to Agent protocol (A2A), and powerful enough to scale across cloud-native, AI-driven.” environments.

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CockroachDB is the distributed backbone for The Ory Network, a global identity service built to deliver compliance, resilience, and global scale. Their joint capabilities were recently highlighted in an OpenAI case study, showcasing how the combined power of Ory’s modular Hydra Enterprise License and CockroachDB’s distributed architecture enabled more than 400 million monthly authorization checks while managed in OpenAI’s virtual private cloud, providing them the control and flexibility they require.

“Building a truly modular system that meets customers where they’re at is a lot of work; it takes a certain level of business maturity and product maturity to be able to do that in a flexible way,” said Benjamin Billings, Engineering Manager of Identity Platforms at OpenAI. “Finding a product and company with the business sense and engineering backing to actually have it broken apart so you can pick and choose what works in our stack was really important to us.”

This real-world deployment highlights how flexible, modular identity solutions—when paired with resilient infrastructure—can meet the performance and control demands of today’s most advanced AI-driven environments. It also highlights the growing need for IAM platforms that integrate seamlessly into diverse enterprise architectures, rather than forcing rigid implementation approaches.

“Monolithic legacy and homegrown identity solutions were not built for today’s scale, complexity, or control desired by those enterprises that want to own their customer experience” said Jeff Kukowski, CEO of Ory Corp. “Ory’s modular architecture gives enterprises precise control—deploying only what they need, such as Ory Hydra for CIAM authorization—without added complexity or vendor lock-in. Our partnership with Cockroach Labs enables organizations to scale identity management with the resilience and flexibility required for modern digital transformation.”

As businesses integrate generative AI (GenAI) into core workflows, machine agents are now acting on behalf of users, customers, and partners. According to Imperva, automated traffic has officially overtaken human activity online, with bots accounting for 51 percent of all w**********—37 percent of which is malicious. This evolution demands a fundamentally new approach to identity: one that supports dynamic, context-aware interactions between human and non-human actors. Traditional IAM systems were not built for this level of scale, autonomy, or fluid delegation. Ory’s integrated solution with CockroachDB fills this gap by combining composable, modular IAM with a resilient, distributed database architecture purpose-built for cloud-native, GenAI-driven workloads.

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“With MCP and A2A emerging as the connective tissue for Agentic AI and the services they access, the underlying infrastructure must be secure, cloud-native, and distributed,” said Allen Terleto, VP of Global Partners and Ecosystem at Cockroach Labs. “Our partnership with Ory delivers this foundation, enabling organizations to scale identity and access management seamlessly across users, services, and autonomous AI agents—across any deployment environment—without compromising on security or resilience.”

Enterprises today seek self-managed IAM solutions because they offer the control and agility needed to fully manage customer interactions, respond to identity-related threats, and deeply integrate with internal systems and roadmaps.

This shift is particularly pronounced in regulated industries like financial services, where data sovereignty, operational resiliency, and compliance requirements are driving a move away from legacy IAM platforms. Traditional IAM vendors often lock customers into rigid and opaque ‘black boxes’, while their platforms struggle to scale globally and securely manage PII across multiple regions.

The Ory and Cockroach Labs partnership represents the infrastructure layer for the future of identity—resilient, composable, and ready for a world where autonomous AI agents and human activity are deeply intertwined. Together, the companies are helping enterprises secure the next generation of intelligent workloads with confidence, compliance, and scale.

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