Every company running automated infrastructure eventually ends up with the same problem. Somewhere in a configuration file, a pipeline, or an environment variable, there is an API key that never expires, quietly authenticating requests to cloud services, package registries, and AI platforms from any machine until someone manually rotates it.
That is a real security liability, and most engineering teams accept it as an unavoidable cost of doing business. Pulumi just made it significantly easier to solve.
Short-Lived Tokens Instead of Stored Keys
Pulumi ESC, which stands for Environments, Secrets, and Configuration, is Pulumi’s system for managing credentials and configuration across infrastructure pipelines. This week, Pulumi added a provider called fn::open::oidc that lets any ESC environment generate a short-lived token for any service that accepts one, without storing anything.
The standard behind this is called OIDC, or OpenID Connect, an open protocol for verifying identity between systems. Instead of storing a static API key for a service like Anthropic’s Claude API, Cloudsmith, or JFrog Artifactory, your pipeline asks Pulumi ESC to generate a token when the environment opens. Pulumi signs that token, scopes it to a specific service, and stamps it with an expiry. The token expires within the hour. The service checks the signature and issues its own short-lived credential from there. Nothing gets stored permanently anywhere.
The difference matters when something goes wrong. A leaked static API key works for anyone, from any machine, until someone notices and rotates it. A leaked OIDC token from this system is almost certainly expired before an attacker can act on it.
Why This Matters for AI Pipelines
AI agents running inside CI/CD pipelines need credentials to function. An agent that reviews code, generates documentation, or runs evaluations needs to call external APIs to do its work. If those APIs are authenticated with long-lived keys stored in environment variables, every agent run carries the full risk of exposing those keys through a misconfigured log, a compromised runner, or a poorly scoped permission.
Short-lived tokens change that calculus entirely. The credential expires within the hour. A careless log statement cannot leak a key that outlasts the task it enabled.
This matters more now because AI API access is expensive and high-value. A leaked Claude or Anthropic API key is not just a security problem. It is a billing problem.
How to Think About the Setup
The setup involves declaring the OIDC provider in a Pulumi ESC environment, naming the audience the target service expects, and importing that environment wherever credentials are needed. Pulumi logs every token issuance with the audience, subject, environment, and lifetime. Your trust policy at each service stays at one entry rather than one per pipeline.
Most companies are still running on static keys scattered across environments and CI systems. The infrastructure to replace them has existed in theory for years. This release makes it practical.
Static credentials sitting in configurations are one of the most common and most preventable security risks in modern infrastructure. Cleaning them up is a project most teams keep deferring. Now there is fewer reasons to keep waiting.
Want to explore how better secrets management could strengthen your infrastructure? Let’s talk.