Blog ← Why do AI agents need identity?
Why do AI agents need identity?
2026-08-30
AI agents are moving from chatting to doing: comparing prices and placing orders, booking flights, negotiating terms with another company's systems. As soon as an agent spends money, signs agreements or makes commitments on someone's behalf, three old questions arrive.
Whose agent is this?
When your system receives a request from an agent, the first thing you need to know is who stands behind it — a legitimate company's procurement assistant, or an impostor script? On the network an agent is just a stream of requests; without verifiable identity, the answer is a guess.
What is it authorized to do?
Knowing the owner is not enough. "May look up prices" and "may pay directly" are very different mandates. Most agents today inherit their owner's full account permissions — like handing every key in the house to a courier. The sound approach is a checkable digital mandate: what, for how long, up to what limit — rejected beyond scope.
Is it still trustworthy right now?
Identity is not a one-off. Code gets modified, keys leak, owners revoke authority. Being trustworthy yesterday says nothing about now, so alongside "who it is" you need a live-checkable current status — like checking whether a car has been reported stolen, not just inspecting its factory paperwork.
No verifiable identity, no accountability
All three questions converge on accountability. When an agent misbehaves — an overcharge, a wrong contract, deleted data — who answers for it? If its actions carry no cryptographic signature and its identity cannot be verified, the aftermath is finger-pointing. It is like cars without license plates: the point is not to stop the cars, but that after an accident nobody even knows whom to call. Giving agents identity is not a restriction; it is what lets them be trusted to act.
What JIAOZI does
JIAOZI does two things: it issues agents identity credentials based on open standards (W3C DID/VC) — who the agent is, on whose behalf it acts, what it is authorized to do and its live status; and it lets anyone verify that credential for free, with no signup and no dependency on our servers being online. Verification is free forever, because an identity is only as useful as how often it gets verified.
This article is a technical explainer, not legal advice. This service provides technical identity verification and does not constitute electronic certification under the PRC Electronic Signature Law.