Operator accountability for autonomous agents
Every AI agent that transacts needs an accountable operator behind it. Groundmark anchors that accountability in DNS, the infrastructure already governing every corner of the internet, and makes it verifiable, cold, by any relying party, with no central registry.
- 01Agent signs the request
- 02DNS resolves the operator's key
- 03An IDSP attests operator facts
- 04The relying party verifies, cold
Agent commerce has no identity layer
Protocols like x402 have solved payment mechanics for autonomous agents. But those transactions carry no identity. There is no standard way for an agent to prove who operates it, what it is authorised to do, or whether its operator is accountable.
- 01
No accountable principal
No verifiable link between an autonomous agent and the organisation that deployed it. A relying party has no way to know who to hold responsible if something goes wrong.
- 02
No delegation record
No standard mechanism for an operator to express what its agent is authorised to do, and no way for a third party to verify that authorisation cold.
- 03
No contextual attestation
Different transactions require different facts. Whether an operator is present in a jurisdiction, holds a licence, or passes a KYC check: none of this is currently portable across relying parties.
- 04
No trust without a prior relationship
Every current approach requires the agent and relying party to have met before, or to rely on a walled garden that vouches for both. Cold verification, between strangers, does not exist.
One fixed loop. The variables are on top.
Walk through a real Groundmark verification. The binding layer, the attesting party and the question are all independent. Change any of them and the protocol underneath is identical.
One schema. The depth lives in method_disclosure.
The IDSP's primary obligation is to disclose what it verified, not just to assert a conclusion. A thin check and a regulatory-grade check are the same attestation with different method strings. The relying party reads the method and decides.
Provenance
Cryptographic proof that a request was signed by the agent named in DNS. No attestation required. Standalone and useful on its own.
Accountability
Operator existence and domain control, verified by an IDSP. Method disclosed. The substrate every higher claim composes on.
Identity
Specific operator facts: jurisdictional presence, business registration, KYC. The method string carries how it was checked.
Regulatory
Professional licence, biometric liveness, regulated KYC/AML. Subject to audit. The IDSP is accountable to the relying party.
Composable, not a replacement
Identity, discovery, authorisation and payment for autonomous agents are being worked on by several groups in parallel. Each addresses a distinct part of an agent transaction. Groundmark is the attestation layer, designed to sit alongside the rest of the stack.
Groundmark occupies a structurally distinct layer. Every adjacent protocol operates at service discovery, identification or runtime authorisation. None provide third-party attestation about operator facts from a party with method-disclosure obligations. This is not a naming difference; it is a structural gap.
Every component already exists
Groundmark recombines DNS registration, DNSSEC, RDAP, HTTP Message Signatures and registrar verification into an attestation layer. The contribution is recognising that these, combined, solve the agent identity problem that agentic commerce requires.
_agentid TXT record
The operator publishes the agent's Ed25519 public key in DNS under a reserved underscore label. Small, stable, aggressively cacheable. The cryptographic root of everything above it.
_agentclaim TXT record
A pointer to an externally hosted attestation. The agent carries the pointer, not the proof. The relying party lifts the attestation directly from the IDSP: the agent cannot write it and cannot forge it.
RFC 9421 HTTP Message Signatures
Agents sign HTTP requests using a key identifier that resolves through DNS. Standard, no bespoke header format. DNSSEC validates the key chain end to end.
Method disclosure, not conclusions
An IDSP attests to what it did and how it verified it. The method_disclosure field carries this in every attestation. The relying party, not the IDSP, makes the trust decision. Pluralism of IDSPs is deliberate.
RDAP: the inverted incentive
For human domain holders, the trajectory has been toward less WHOIS information. Agents invert that incentive: an operator's value as a counterparty is proportional to the verifiable information it exposes.
DNSSEC throughout
Required for all Groundmark DNS lookups. The chain of trust is validated end to end, from the requesting agent's domain to the IDSP's signing key. An unsigned zone is a fatal verification failure.
Try the console
The verification console runs the full Groundmark loop against live DNS. Pick a scenario and a fixture (correct acceptances, correct rejections and edge cases) and watch each step resolve.
- Registry, platform and regulatory IDSP scenarios
- Nine-step verification sequence, animated in real time
- Correct rejections shown explicitly: expired, wrong subject, bad signature, unsigned zone
- The graduated trust ladder: thin vs elevated methods, same schema
Login guest · Password groundmark2026
Two Internet-Drafts. One modular protocol.
Groundmark is being built as an internet standard through the IETF process, by Elliot Noss and Mark Jeftovic. The core stands on its own at Level 0, with no normative dependency on the attestation draft, and the two compose when both are present.
DNS-Anchored Identity Discovery for Autonomous Agents
Defines _agentid and _agentclaim record formats, RFC 9421 request authentication, DNSSEC requirements and Level 0 provenance. Self-standing. No dependency on the attestation draft.
Operator Attestation Framework for Autonomous Agents
Defines the IDSP role and obligations, the four-level trust taxonomy, method_disclosure semantics, the claim vocabulary, revocation and the governance framework for IDSPs.
Source and reference implementation: github.com/easydns/groundmark
Two ways in
Building agents or relying parties? Start with a test identity. Running domains for other people? Check where your zones stand today.
Get a sandbox agent identity
Sign up for the first batch of test Groundmark identities, issued by trustedweb.com, an independent IDSP. We'll write when the batch is ready (date to be confirmed).
You can also join the working group shaping the drafts.
Is your domain ready?
Groundmark records live in DNS and need a DNSSEC-signed zone. Enter your domains to see where they stand today, then ask for a design-partner slot.
The check is a quick public lookup through Cloudflare's DNS resolver, run from your browser. It reports whether DNSSEC is on and validating, and whether any _agentid or _agentclaim records exist at the name you enter. It is not a verification, and nothing you type here is stored unless you send the form below.