Identity
Agent not recognized
Evaluation stopped before anything else was considered. Nothing was executed, and nothing in WordPress changed.
- Agents & identity
- 5 min read
1. Check the agent state first
A revoked or paused agent is refused by design. Before assuming a fault, open the agent and read its state — this resolves a large share of these reports on its own.
If the agent is paused and you did not pause it, check whether the site is in an emergency mode, which refuses requests site-wide.
2. Check the environment
A staging agent calling production is a different identity, not the same one in a different place. This is the second most common cause, and it usually appears right after someone copies a configuration between environments.
Confirm which environment the calling system is pointed at, and which environment the credential belongs to.
3. Run a connection health test
The health test tells you whether the credential still resolves to this agent. A suspended or rotated Application Password stops resolving immediately — that is the intended behaviour of a rotation, not a failure.
If the connection is suspended, reconnect it. If it was rotated, the calling system is still sending the old secret.
4. Check what the caller is actually sending
Confirm the calling system is sending the credential you think it is, and not a cached one from a previous rotation. Environment variables, secret managers, and container images are all common places for an old value to survive a rotation.
Also confirm the request is authenticating at all. An unauthenticated request has no identity to resolve, which produces the same symptom from a completely different cause.
What not to do
A duplicate identity splits the audit history in two and leaves an unexplained credential in circulation. Rotate the credential on the existing identity instead.
Agents & identity
Keep the boundary while you fix the problem.
A good fix restores intended behaviour without creating a second path around WordPress or the governed request lifecycle.