Who is the 'I' in AI? Establishing Decentralized Identity and Accountability for Autonomous Agents

Ahammod Munim Ramil, Khalid Al Kafi, M. A. Abdullahis Sany, Muktadirul Islam Nibir, Md Yeasin Ali +2

The rapid proliferation of autonomous AI agents in decentralized ecosystems challenges existing identity paradigms. While human identity is traditionally anchored in biological and/or self-asserted attributes and government credentials, AI agents lack a standardized definition of selfhood, creating critical gaps in trust and accountability. This paper introduces a novel framework for establishing Decentralized AI Identity rooted in Self-sovereign identity (SSI) principles. We propose a formal model that clearly distinguishes human users and AI agents, enabling distinct verification logic for each class while maintaining a unified identity calculus. The central to our contribution is the ABCD Framework, a multi-layered approach to agent identification and verification: (A) Algorithmic Fingerprint, which binds the identity to static model architectures and provenance; (B) Behavioural Fingerprint, which verifies dynamic performance metrics over time; (C) Cryptographic Identity, which anchors the agent via Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and (D) Delegation, which cryptographically binds agent actions to respective human accountability. By orthogonalizing these dimensions, we model…