Agent Identity & Credentialing
Establishing the TRUST and CRED Foundation
Why This Comes First
Every other governance control for an AI agent — its privilege scope, its behavioral monitoring — depends on first answering two questions: who is accountable for this agent, and can it prove what it claims to be? Skip these, and every downstream control is built on an unverified foundation.
What This Includes
- Sponsor accountability review — establishing a named human or organizational sponsor for every agent before it reaches production, with a traceable chain back to a real accountability anchor.
- Model provenance documentation — recording and verifying the foundation model, fine-tune lineage, system prompt, and tool manifest an agent actually runs, analogous to a software bill of materials.
- Workload identity architecture — moving agents off long-lived, standing credentials and onto short-lived, task-scoped identity issued at runtime.
- Delegation chain governance — ensuring that when an agent spawns a sub-agent, authority is explicitly scoped and narrowed at every hop, never inherited wholesale.
- Cross-agent trust boundaries — defining how trust is (and isn’t) transitive across a multi-agent pipeline.
The Outcome
A clear, auditable answer to “who is accountable for this agent, and can we verify it is what it claims to be” — for every agent in your environment, not just the ones someone remembered to review.
Contact Us
Get in touch to discuss establishing agent identity and credentialing for your organization.