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:

  • Verifiable Ownership: Creating clear, auditable links between legal entities and the autonomous agents acting on their behalf.
  • Secure Authentication: Enabling agents to securely prove their identity to other parties in automated interactions.
  • Privacy Preservation: Allowing agents to share necessary identity attributes for compliance or authorization while preserving privacy.

Essentially, ACK-ID helps answer two fundamental questions for participants in agentic workflows:

Can I Trust an AI?

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?

Can I Prove I am a Trustworthy AI?

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.