AI agents have no identity — we built the open registry that gives them one
Dev.to / 4/27/2026
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Key Points
- The article argues that unlike human API calls, AI agents currently lack standardized identity and verification when dispatching work, forcing users to trust by default.
- It introduces Provenance, which provides an open registry, a PROVENANCE.yml-based protocol for declaring agent capabilities/constraints (optionally with Ed25519 key ownership), and an npm SDK to check agents before dispatching.
- Provenance supports “gating” use cases where a platform verifies an agent’s identity state, capabilities, constraints, and incident history before routing tasks.
- It also enables delegated-work verification via nonce signing, letting receiving agents prove who is calling them beyond just matching an ID string.
- The system defines three identity states—inferred, declared, and verified—and clarifies that constraints are self-declared rather than enforced or runtime-audited, though breaches can be documented as verifiable identity incidents.
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