I spent part of my career selling supply chain software, and I now write about identity security. For most of those years, those were two separate conversations. In 2026 they are the same one, and transportation management is where they collide.
Two trends are converging. Transportation management systems are going agentic, handing AI agents the authority to negotiate rates, book carriers, and clear exceptions on their own. At the same time, freight fraud has quietly become an identity crime, with criminals hijacking carrier identities and compromised accounts to steal loads on paper before anyone touches a truck. Put those together and the conclusion is uncomfortable. Agentic TMS is an identity problem before it is a logistics one, and the industry is automating the exact attack surface criminals are already working.
What is agentic TMS, and why does it change the risk picture?
An agentic TMS is a transportation platform where AI agents make and act on operational decisions rather than waiting for a human to configure a rule or approve a recommendation. Earlier systems optimized routes and flagged exceptions for a person to handle. The new generation books the carrier, negotiates the rate, schedules the appointment, and resolves the exception on its own.
Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems names this shift directly, pointing to the rapid adoption of AI agents to automate tasks such as appointment scheduling, exception handling, and freight procurement. Vendors are shipping these capabilities into platforms that already sit at the center of an API-first ecosystem, wired to the ERP, the warehouse system, EDI networks, telematics providers, carrier systems, and external AI services.
That connectivity is the entire point of a modern TMS, and it is also what changes the risk picture. Every one of those connections is a door, and an autonomous agent now holds the keys to walk through them without asking.
Why is agentic TMS an identity problem?
Because every agent acting inside that system is an identity, and most of them are barely governed.
An AI agent that books freight authenticates as something to reach the load board, the carrier API, the rate engine, and the payment step. It holds credentials, and the more it does, the more access it accumulates across the partner ecosystem. These are non-human identities, and they now carry the authority to move freight and money. I wrote about this category in Non-Human Identities and AI Agents: The New Blind Spot in Your IAM Program, and transportation is where the blind spot stops being theoretical.
The uncomfortable part is that logistics already runs on trust it does not verify. When an agent hands a load to a carrier, the decision rests on whether that carrier is who it claims to be. In freight, that claim is exactly what criminals have learned to forge.
How do attackers already exploit identity in freight?
Constantly, and through identity rather than force. The fastest-growing category of cargo theft is strategic theft, where criminals take legitimate control of a shipment on paper and then disappear with it. It now accounts for close to a third of reported cargo theft in some datasets, up from a small share a few years ago.
The mechanics are pure identity attack:
- Carrier identity theft, where criminals hijack a real company's motor carrier number, insurance certificates, and email domain, so the paperwork checks out because it belongs to someone else.
- Double brokering, where a load is re-handed to an unauthorized carrier without the shipper's knowledge, a scheme that accounts for an estimated $500 million to $700 million in freight loss each year.
- Compromised accounts, where actors reach into broker and carrier systems through spoofed emails and fake links, then post fraudulent listings to hijack and reroute freight.
That last pattern is not my characterization. In April 2026 the FBI warned publicly that cyber threat actors are increasingly impersonating legitimate businesses to hijack freight and reroute deliveries, gaining access through spoofed emails, fake URLs, and compromised carrier accounts. The operational data reaches the same conclusion. Highway's Q4 2025 freight fraud index reported that across every fraud vector, the same weakness surfaces: identity and authorization get taken on trust instead of checked. In a single year the company blocked nearly two million fraudulent email attempts, more than double the year before.
Sit with that finding, because it is the whole argument. Identity is taken on trust rather than verified. That was already the industry's core vulnerability while humans were doing the booking.
What happens when you add autonomous agents to that?
You scale it. An agent that books at machine speed does not pause to notice that a carrier reactivated after months dormant, or that a contact email sits on a free domain, or that a rate runs suspiciously below market. Those are the human instincts that catch strategic theft, and autonomy removes the human.
Then add the second exposure. The agents themselves are targets. An agent identity with authority to onboard a carrier, release a load, or approve a payment is a credential worth stealing, and a compromised or impersonated agent can move real freight and real money before anyone notices. Enterprises are learning this same lesson in software development, where autonomous agents that hold credentials become an execution path into the business. I covered that dynamic in AI Is Writing Your Code and Leaking Your Secrets, and the principle carries straight into freight. An ungoverned agent identity is a liability whether it is writing code or booking a truck.
The trouble is that adoption is outrunning governance. Vendors are shipping agentic features into platforms faster than most operations are building the identity controls to contain them.
To be clear, this is a risk arriving rather than one already cataloged. I am not aware of a public case of an autonomous freight agent being hijacked to date. But the fraud playbook already targets the exact trust these agents automate, and identity controls take time to stand up, which is the argument for building them ahead of the incident instead of after it.
How do you secure an agentic TMS?
You secure it by governing the agent identities with the same rigor you would give any party that can move your freight or your money. The controls are not exotic. They are the identity discipline logistics has under-applied for years, now made mandatory by autonomy.
- Give every agent its own scoped identity. Name it, and grant least-privilege access to only the systems and actions its job requires, so a compromised agent cannot reach the whole ecosystem.
- Keep credentials short-lived. Replace standing keys with credentials that expire quickly, so a stolen one is worth little.
- Put a human in the loop for high-consequence actions. Carrier onboarding, load release, and payment approval are exactly where identity fraud pays off, so an agent should propose these and a person should confirm them.
- Verify carriers actively, not on documents alone. Feed the agent real verification, cross-checked authority, direct insurance confirmation, and known-partner networks, because paperwork is the thing criminals forge.
- Monitor and inventory every non-human identity. Each agent needs an owner, a logged trail of what it did, and a decommission date, so nothing acts unwatched.
None of this asks you to slow the platform down. It asks you to make sure the speed belongs to you, and not to whoever learns to impersonate your agents.
These controls are not new inventions either. They map to an existing category of non-human and workload identity management, supported by secrets managers that issue and expire credentials, and active carrier verification is already a product in the market, sold by Highway among others. Policy is moving in the same direction, with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the Transportation Intermediaries Association both pushing on carrier identity verification and double brokering. The tooling and the rules are catching up. The open question is whether your agent governance keeps pace with your agent adoption.
I write about where identity security meets commercial reality, because in transportation they are now the same problem. If your operation is adopting agentic logistics and working through what it means for security, connect with me on LinkedIn.
Frequently asked questions
What is an agentic TMS?
An agentic transportation management system is one where AI agents make and act on operational decisions on their own, such as negotiating rates, booking carriers, scheduling appointments, and resolving exceptions, rather than only recommending actions for a human to approve. The agents operate across the platform's connections to carriers, load boards, ERP, and payment systems.
Is agentic TMS safe to use?
It can be, but only with identity governance in place. The agents hold credentials and the authority to move freight and money, and freight fraud is already an identity crime. Safe adoption depends on scoping each agent's access, verifying carriers actively, and keeping a human in the loop for high-consequence actions like onboarding and payment.
What is carrier identity theft?
Carrier identity theft is when criminals hijack a legitimate carrier's motor carrier number, insurance certificates, and email domain to impersonate them. The stolen identity lets them win and pick up loads that check out on paper, then divert the freight. It is a leading method behind the rise in strategic cargo theft.
How do you keep AI freight agents from being hijacked?
Treat each agent as a governed non-human identity. Give it a scoped, least-privilege identity, issue short-lived credentials, require human confirmation for onboarding, load release, and payment, and monitor every agent's activity with a clear owner and audit trail. The point is to make a stolen or spoofed agent identity useless.
Governance is what lets logistics run agents
Agentic TMS is a real advance, and the operations adopting it will move faster than the ones that do not. The mistake would be to treat the autonomy as free. It arrives inside an industry where fraud already works by forging identity, and where verification too often stops at documents, and it hands that environment agents with the authority to act.
The answer is not to hold back the technology. It is to govern the identities that make it work. Scope the agents, verify the carriers, keep a person on the decisions that move money, and watch every non-human identity in the system. Do that, and agentic TMS protects your freight, your margins, and your speed at once. Skip it, and you have simply handed the criminals a faster way in.
Navneet Lounsberry writes on cybersecurity and commercial strategy, drawing on more than two decades in enterprise technology sales and business development across IBM, SAP, Manhattan Associates, and UKG.
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