The Spark Blog
The Silent Crisis of Token Exchange Inside AI Enterprises
In today’s AI-powered organizations, data is more and more accessed through AI systems that act on behalf of people.
And in this new reality, tokens have become the invisible keys that unlock the entire corporate data universe.
Every interaction between AI systems, MCP servers, and internal API calls depends on tokens, those seemingly harmless strings of characters that silently authenticate and authorize access to sensitive data.
But here is what we are starting to see in the field: employees “share” their tokens to help a colleague.
It often starts innocently,
“Hey, I just need to fetch that dataset for my report, can you give me your token? I cannot access it otherwise.”
It feels like a small act of teamwork, no harm intended, just helping a mate get his job done.
Except, that simple gesture completely dismantles years of security controls, role based access models, and data governance investments that CISOs have worked hard to enforce.
Once tokens begin to change hands, data access policies evaporate.
Even worse, some tokens find their way into Slack threads, shared folders, or WhatsApp groups, and from there, potentially into malicious hands.
Now imagine what happens when that token belongs to an MCP server with enterprise wide data access privileges.
That “helping hand” can escalate into a six or seven-figure data breach, or an AI model being quietly poisoned through compromised access paths.
Is there a cure?
