AI Agents with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials

Abstract

A fundamental limitation of current LLM-based AI agents is their inability to build differentiated trust among each other at the onset of an agent-to-agent dialogue. However, autonomous and interoperable trust establishment becomes essential once agents start to operate beyond isolated environments and engage in dialogues across individual or organizational boundaries. A promising way to fill this gap in Agentic AI is to equip agents with long-lived digital identities and introduce tamper-proof and flexible identity-bound attestations of agents, provisioned by commonly trusted third parties and designed for cross-domain verifiability. This article presents a conceptual framework and a prototypical multi-agent system, where each agent is endowed with a self-sovereign digital identity. It combines a unique and ledger-anchored W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) of an agent with a set of third-party issued W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs). This enables agents at the start of a dialog to prove ownership of their self-controlled DIDs for authentication purposes and to establish various cross-domain trust relationships through the spontaneous exchange of their self-hosted DID-bound VCs. A comprehensive evaluation of the prototypical implementation demonstrates technical feasibility but also reveals limitations once an agent's LLM is in sole charge to control the respective security procedures.

Accepted for presentation at the 18th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2026