What is an agent credential?
A short-lived, scoped proof that an AI agent is who it claims to be, checked before a business trusts a request enough to act on it.
2 min read
Without one, a business has no way to tell a genuine agent acting for a real person apart from any other automated request arriving at its systems. A credential is what closes that gap: it identifies the agent, and often the platform it's running on, without needing a business to build its own verification from scratch. It answers "is this a real agent" specifically, not "is it allowed to spend," which is a separate check.
Good for
Proving an agent is genuine.
Not good for
Proving it's allowed to spend. That's a separate check entirely, handled by AP2 and a Wallet.
What is an AI agent?
An AI system that's given a goal and works toward it on a person's behalf, rather than one that just answers whatever's typed into it, turn by turn.
What is a Wallet, in the Selfe sense?
The record of what a specific AI agent is currently authorised to spend, on whose behalf and up to what limit, checked before Folio settles anything against it.
What is AP2?
Agent Payments Protocol, a standard for proving that a real person authorised an AI agent to spend a specific amount, so a business can verify that before it charges anything.