Verifiable Identity for Agent Interactions
In the emerging agent economy, establishing who an AI agent is — and what person or business is responsible for it — is critical for trust, security, and compliant commerce. Agent Commerce Kit’s Identity protocol (ACK-ID) defines a way to securely and verifiably establish the identities of agents and link them to their human or organizational owners.
ACK-ID addresses key challenges in agent identity:
Essentially, ACK-ID helps answer two fundamental questions for participants in agentic workflows:
As a service provider (or another agent), how can I trust that the AI interacting with me is legitimate, authorized, and represents who it claims to represent?
As an agent owner or operator, how can my AI agent prove its identity and its authority to act on my behalf in a secure, standard way?
ACK-ID addresses these questions by applying open standards for digital identity in a pattern specifically designed for agentic systems. ACK-ID uses and builds upon decentralized identity protocols because they enable entities to control their own digital identifiers rather than rely on central authorities, and that level of identity management is a necessity for AI agent workflows.
Trust in AI is not a one-and-done decision. Trust may change over time based on an agent’s behavior, its owner’s changes in status, reputational factors, and more.