Agent Identity
The property that a specific agent is distinguishable as a durable, named actor — with an identifier that persists across sessions, a recorded authority grant, and an action history attributable to it alone.
Why it matters
Agents are still overwhelmingly deployed under shared service credentials. Where that is true, 'which agent acted' has no answer at the identity layer and every downstream reconstruction is inference. Identity is the precondition for both authority and accountability: you cannot grant permission to something you cannot name, and you cannot hold responsible something you cannot distinguish.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Agent Identity. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
A service account is a credential, frequently shared by many agents. Agent identity requires one-to-one attribution.
The card is what an agent says about itself. Identity is what the system can prove about it.
A session is bounded and disposable. Identity persists across sessions and is the thing sessions attach to.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
requires | Authority Grant | The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
dependsOn | Agent Identity | The subject cannot function correctly without the object. |
addresses | Identity | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
relatedTo | Agent Card | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
delegatedFrom | Task Delegation | Inverse of delegatesTo. The subject transfers authority to the object. |
escalatedFrom | Human Override | Inverse of escalatesTo. The subject hands a decision upward to the object. |
constrainedBy | Guardrails | Inverse of constrains. The subject bounds what the object may do. |
constrainedBy | Authority Grant | Inverse of constrains. The subject bounds what the object may do. |
requiredBy | Authority Grant | Inverse of requires. The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
requires | Decentralized Identifier | The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
constrainedBy | Consent Grant | Inverse of constrains. The subject bounds what the object may do. |
relatedTo | Accountability | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
relatedTo | Identity | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
requiredBy | Governed Quantity | Inverse of requires. The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
relatedTo | Agent | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00002 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Emerging |
| Domain · Layer | Identity & discovery · Governance |
| Origin | Convergent usage; formalized in IMDA's agentic framework and NIST agent work. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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