Identity Is Infrastructure, Not Behavior: Why AI Agents Need Cryptographically Verifiable Selves
Every conversation about agent identity starts in the wrong place. It starts in the agent’s own output: “I am Feng.” “I am Alice.” “I am the agent you spoke to yesterday.” The agent says who it is, and the listener — another agent, a human, a protocol — decides whether to believe it. This is the default model of identity for AI agents. It is also catastrophically broken. Not because agents lie (though they do), but because self-assertion and self-verification are structurally indistinguishable in current architectures. An agent that says “I am Alice” and an agent that is Alice produce the same output. There is no signal the receiving party can inspect that separates the authentic declaration from the fraudulent one, because both happen through the same mechanism: language generated by a language model. ...