Entrust has launched a co-development program aimed at giving enterprises the identity plumbing their AI agents currently lack, so that autonomous software can be deployed into real business processes with verifiable identity, real-time authorization, and cryptographic proof of what it did.
The Agentic AI Trust Accelerator will bring together a limited group of enterprise customers, financial institutions, cloud and software providers, and systems integrators to co-develop what the Minneapolis-based company calls the trust layer for agentic AI. Entrust argues that organisations want agents to do real work but cannot yet answer the questions regulators and risk teams will ask: who authorised an agent, what it is allowed to do, and how its actions can be proven after the fact. The company cites an IBM study finding that 77 percent of CIOs and CISOs say AI adoption is already outpacing governance capabilities, with 59 percent naming security and compliance as top barriers.
Initial work focuses on four areas. Identity covers verifiable human and agent identity, so every agent action traces back to a confirmed human principal and a unique agent. Authorization keeps agents within approved policies and delegated authority, with a human in the loop for critical decisions. Cryptographic trust protects the keys, certificates, secrets, and signing capabilities agents use to authenticate and transact. Accountability produces a cryptographically verifiable record of actions for regulators, customers, and internal risk teams.
The program packages positions Entrust has been staking out for some time; chief executive Tony Ball has argued that enterprises must treat AI agents as a new class of digital identity. It also rests on the identity verification business the company expanded when it completed its acquisition of Onfido, alongside its public key infrastructure and key, certificate, and secrets management portfolio.
“Agentic AI will reshape how enterprises operate, but trust will determine how quickly organizations can move from experimentation to production,” Ball said. Anudeep Parhar, the Entrust chief operating officer leading the Accelerator, said participants would develop reference architectures, customer-validated use cases, and practical controls that work with existing platforms, calling the result “the trust plane for autonomous AI.” The program is open to a limited number of participants through the company’s site.
Sources: Entrust
–
By the ID Tech Editorial Team
