Four announcements on a single day this week show the two directions the identity industry is taking with AI agents. BioCatch and LexisNexis Risk Solutions launched tools that detect when an agent, rather than a person, is on the other end of a session. The Linux Foundation and crypto infrastructure company zerohash moved to give agents identities that can be verified before they act.
BioCatch’s new capability, called AiRE, for Agentic AI Risk Essentials, is aimed at banks. It runs through the behavioral monitoring that BioCatch customers already have in place and flags AI agents interacting with digital banking platforms in real time, before any money moves, along with indicators that the activity may be risky. It looks at behavioral anomalies, synthetic inputs, the browser’s permission profile, agent infrastructure and whether an agent declares itself. BioCatch said close to half of the agentic interactions it has detected in customer sessions took place at account opening, with the rest spread across logins, account management and payments. “Those institutions must be able to first reliably detect whether the entity controlling a session is a human or an agent and if the intent of that entity is genuine or malicious,” said Chief Product Officer Ayelet Eliezer. Visa agreed in August to acquire BioCatch for $2.4 billion.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions brought the same question to the public sector with Know Your Agent intelligence, available through its ThreatMetrix and BehavioSec products. It lets government agencies see when an AI agent enters a benefits portal, tax system or licensing site, and separate agents from human users and conventional bots, so that each agency can decide how to handle the interaction under its own policies. The company said its analysis of global digital transactions shows agentic traffic grew 750 percent in the first half of 2026, and that many personal agents do not declare themselves. “Agencies need to know whether they are dealing with a person, a bot or an AI agent before public funds, benefits or sensitive information are put at risk,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of the company’s government business.
The other two announcements start from the agent’s side. The Linux Foundation said it has taken in Agent Name Service, or ANS, an open standard that names and registers AI agents, publishes their identities through the Domain Name System and lets others verify them using the kind of certificates that websites already rely on. The specification runs to seven documents covering naming, registration and versioning, DNS publication, public log auditing, integrity monitoring and agent-to-agent authentication, and is now governed by a technical steering committee. Eleven organizations have contributed to or adopted it, including Cisco, Cloudflare, DigiCert, GoDaddy, Infoblox and Salesforce. Singapore’s government has been exploring a DNS-based way to identify agents with some of the same companies.
“Autonomous AI agents are transacting and operating across global systems, but they can’t succeed without verifiable identity,” said Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s CEO. DigiCert’s Brian Trzupek described the idea as “a passport for AI agents.”
zerohash, which provides regulated crypto and stablecoin infrastructure to financial companies, bought for an undisclosed sum a technology stack and patent portfolio covering agent authentication, permissioning and machine-initiated financial transactions, and hired its creator, former NASA research scientist Mark Meadows, as head of applied AI. In the design zerohash described, every agent credential resolves to a verified person or institution, which sets what the agent may do, where and up to what amount, and can revoke that permission at any time. Each agent-initiated transaction would carry Know Your Agent screening and an attestation of which agent acted and under whose authority.
Sources: BioCatch, PR Newswire, Linux Foundation, GlobeNewswire
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
