The Self in Motion
First-Person Credentials, Agentic AI, and the Next Architecture of Digital Agency
1. Introduction — The Second Life of Identity
The digital self is mutating again. If the first generation of the internet digitized communication and the second digitized commerce, the current generation is digitizing agency. We are entering a world populated not just by human users but by semi-autonomous agents—software entities that act, negotiate, transact, and learn on behalf of individuals or institutions.
The debate is no longer about who we are online, but who—or what—acts for us. And in that transition lies both promise and peril. The First-Person Credentials (FPC) framework, originally conceived as a way to restore personal sovereignty in a surveillance-heavy world, now encounters an unexpected partner: the rise of agentic AI and agent networks.
What happens when digital identity is no longer static proof but dynamic behaviour? When credentials meet cognition, and autonomy is shared between human and machine?
This essay argues that the convergence of FPC and agentic AI can yield a new kind of trust fabric—if designed deliberately. Done badly, it risks creating an ungovernable web of autonomous entities that erode consent and accountability. Done right, it could inaugurate a new epoch of augmented agency: humans and their digital agents acting in coordinated, verifiable, and ethically bounded systems.
2. From Static Proof to Dynamic Agency
Most digital identity frameworks, including national ID systems, assume a simple model: a human subject, a verifying institution, and a record of truth. The credential proves a fact; the system authenticates it.
But AI agents transform that logic. An agent is not a passive record—it’s an actor. It can initiate transactions, sign smart contracts, and converse with other agents. In such environments, identity is not only about “who are you” but also “what can you do, and under whose authority?”
First-Person Credentials supply the missing layer of delegable trust. Instead of hard-coding permissions into opaque platforms, FPC allows a human to issue cryptographically verifiable instructions to their AI counterpart: you may disclose this, negotiate that, and revoke permission here.
This is not science fiction—it’s the necessary evolution of digital identity in an agentic world. Without verifiable delegation, the boundary between self and software becomes dangerously porous. Every leak, bias, or misinterpretation by an AI could be attributed to its human principal, with no clear audit trail of intent. FPC provides the grammar for this new language of interaction: credentials that bind actions to explicit consent.
3. The Rise of Agentic Networks
The concept of agent networks—ecosystems of interoperable AI entities coordinating across domains—represents the next phase of digital infrastructure. Imagine a travel booking handled not by a web form but by your personal AI negotiating with airline, visa, and insurance agents. Or consider a financial ecosystem where investment agents verify each other’s provenance before executing trades.
These networks are driven by three converging trends:
Autonomous decision loops: models capable of planning and acting with minimal human supervision;
Standardised communication protocols: schemas like the W3C’s DIDComm or Open Agent Frameworks;
Verifiable provenance: cryptographic assurance that an agent, its data, and its intent are authentic.
This third pillar—provenance—is precisely where FPC enters. Each agent must carry a verifiable credential proving (a) its origin, (b) its authority, and (c) the scope of its delegation. Without such assurances, agent networks devolve into chaos, vulnerable to spoofing and manipulation.
In this sense, FPC becomes the identity substrate of the agentic economy—the way TCP/IP was for the early internet. It doesn’t dictate what agents can do, but ensures that each action is traceable to a legitimate origin.
4. Delegation, Consent, and the Extended Self
Philosophically, the agentic turn forces a rethinking of personhood. Where traditional identity frameworks map static attributes (name, age, nationality), agentic systems must map intent. The question becomes: how does a person’s will translate into machine action without loss of meaning or abuse of trust?
The FPC model resolves this through verifiable delegation. A credential could assert:
the identity of the delegator (human principal);
the scope of delegation (specific tasks or data domains);
the duration or revocability of consent;
the accountability channel (logs, dispute mechanisms).
This enables a digital equivalent of legal agency—the same way a power of attorney allows a lawyer to act for a client within limits.
Crucially, this model maintains first-person authorship. The agent acts as an extension of the individual, not as a separate moral entity. The chain of accountability remains legible, cryptographically and ethically.
In effect, FPC transforms AI from a black-box servant into a contractual counterpart—a partner whose authority is derived, constrained, and revocable. This is the foundation of what might be called consent-driven autonomy.
5. Governance in the Age of Intelligent Proxies
With thousands of autonomous agents operating under delegated authority, governance becomes nontrivial. Who regulates an ecosystem where every user is also a micro-sovereign?
Here, the lessons of FPC governance—multi-stakeholder oversight, layered trust, transparent revocation—apply directly to agentic networks. Key principles include:
Registries of intent: every delegation event recorded as a verifiable transaction, allowing audit and accountability.
Revocation infrastructure: agents’ permissions can be time-bound or purpose-bound, automatically expiring.
Agent provenance chains: a traceable lineage from human owner to AI instance to derived agent, ensuring authenticity.
Ethical protocols: agents must publish “terms of engagement”—machine-readable constraints on behaviour, similar to Creative Commons licenses for actions.
By embedding these features, FPC acts as the constitutional layer of the agentic internet. Without it, AI governance risks repeating the same centralization pattern that broke trust in Web 2.0.
6. The Economic Dimension — Markets of Trust
The fusion of FPC and agentic AI doesn’t just rewire identity; it rewires value. In a world where agents transact autonomously, trust itself becomes a currency. Credentials replace reputation scores, and verifiable consent replaces Terms of Service.
Consider healthcare. A personal AI agent could negotiate data sharing with research institutions using your explicit FPC-based permissions, earning you compensation or ensuring privacy. In finance, algorithmic trading agents could verify counterparty credentials before executing contracts, eliminating costly intermediaries.
These are not utopias—they are the logical extension of tokenized trust. By assigning provenance to every decision, the system converts uncertainty into negotiable confidence.
This, however, introduces new markets in delegated risk. If your AI agent misbehaves, who bears liability? Insurers may require proof of consent logs. Auditors may demand transparent FPC records. Economies will evolve around verifiable responsibility, not just verifiable identity.
7. The Ethical Tightrope
The same technology that enables empowerment can amplify exploitation. Agentic AI can easily become a new layer of surveillance—monitoring preferences, predicting behaviour, nudging outcomes. Combined with nationalist data regimes, such systems could resurrect the digital panopticon under a friendlier name: “personal assistant.”
The FPC framework, if misused, could legitimise pervasive consent—consent so granular it becomes meaningless. Hence, the ethical challenge is not simply to encode privacy but to preserve cognitive liberty—the freedom to think, choose, and delegate without manipulation.
This requires a shift in design philosophy: from “user-friendly” to user-sovereign. Interfaces should display the full implications of delegation, record agent actions transparently, and allow revocation at will. In the agentic era, clarity becomes the new ethics. If users cannot see what their agents are doing, consent collapses into faith.
8. Political Implications — Beyond the Nation-State
Agentic networks operate across borders; their natural jurisdiction is the protocol, not the nation. This will unsettle governments that equate sovereignty with control over citizens’ data.
Yet the FPC-agentic combination could, paradoxically, enhance legitimate sovereignty by providing verifiable but privacy-preserving mechanisms for cross-border trust. Governments could authenticate citizens’ agents without harvesting their data. Regulators could monitor compliance through zero-knowledge proofs rather than intrusive surveillance.
In this sense, FPC and agentic AI offer an escape hatch from the trap of digital nationalism. They allow sovereignty to evolve from territorial control to protocol stewardship—nations as custodians of standards, not prisons of data.
Populist politics will resist this transition, since decentralised agents undermine charismatic control. But the tide is irreversible. As intelligent proxies proliferate, authority will migrate toward systems that can prove legitimacy without demanding obedience.
9. The Future of the Self — Multiplicity and Continuity
The agentic age shatters the singular notion of identity. A person may soon maintain dozens of active agents: a financial AI, a research AI, a social AI—each carrying fragments of the self into specialised environments.
FPC provides the connective tissue among them. It maintains continuity across multiplicity. Every agent carries a verifiable link back to the same principal, preserving a coherent digital personhood without centralisation.
This architecture reflects a deeper anthropological truth: the self is already plural. We perform different roles—professional, familial, civic—each with distinct credentials. FPC simply encodes that pluralism into machine-readable form.
The danger is fragmentation: when agents act too independently, the human loses narrative control. Hence, the governance dashboard of the future will not be a social-media profile but a consent cockpit—a console showing what each agent is doing, where, and under whose credential authority. Agency, once philosophical, becomes operational.
10. Conclusion — Designing for Reciprocal Autonomy
The convergence of First-Person Credentials and agentic AI forces us to rethink digital personhood from the ground up. Identity can no longer be treated as a static noun; it is a verb—a continuous negotiation among humans, their machines, and their societies.
FPC provides the syntax; agentic AI supplies the semantics. Together they can build systems of reciprocal autonomy—machines that respect human will because that will is cryptographically and ethically legible.
This future will not emerge automatically. It will require standards, governance, and courage:
Standards that bind identity and agency through open protocols.
Governance that ensures accountability without strangling innovation.
Courage to treat autonomy not as a threat to power but as its renewal.
When the history of digital civilisation is written, the line between control and freedom will not run between humans and machines, but between architectures of domination and architectures of consent.
First-Person Credentials and agentic AI, if intertwined wisely, could tip that balance toward freedom—creating a world where our digital agents act not merely for us, but with us, in shared, verifiable trust.