Identity
What an agent is, as a distinguishable actor and as a legal matter: whether it can be individually named, whether its actions are attributable to it alone, and to whom its outputs belong.
Why it matters
Applies to whoever must attribute an action and to whoever claims rights in what the agent produces. It bites twice — operationally the first time two agents act and only one credential exists, and legally the first time an agent generates something valuable and ownership is contested. It fails at the shared service account, which is how most agents are deployed today: where three agents share a credential, 'which one acted' has no answer at the identity layer and every downstream reconstruction is inference. The ownership half is entirely unresolved in law.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Identity. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
Authentication proves a credential is valid. Identity requires that the credential belongs to one agent and no other.
An agent has no legal personality. Its identity is an attribution mechanism, not a status.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
addresses | Identity | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
relatedTo | Agent Identity | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
relatedTo | Decentralized Identifier | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
relatedTo | Chain Of Title | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00030 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Emerging |
| Domain · Layer | MARQUE questions · Governance |
| Origin | MARQUE question 06. The least developed of the eight in published standards. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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