Pic

AI agent security is usually approached as an identity problem: the question becomes “what is the agent’s identity, and what is it allowed to do?”. This framing is inherited from decades of human-centric and client-centric authorization design, and it works reasonably well as long as the entity being authorized is stable, persistent, and accountable in its own right. AI agents are none of those things in practice, and the framing produces a steady accumulation of edge cases that identity-centric security models keep trying to patch without changing the underlying assumption.

On April 20–21, 2026, the 4th International Workshop on Trends in Digital Identity (TDI 2026) takes place in Verona. The workshop program also includes the talk “Provenance Identity Continuity (PIC): Secure Authority Propagation from Human and Non-Human Origins Across Trust Boundaries”, presented by Nicola Gallo and Antonio Radesca (Nitro Agility Srl).

On March 3, 2026, LF Decentralized Trust hosted the session “From Identity-First to Authority Continuity”, presented by Nicola Gallo.

On March 3, 2026, LF Decentralized Trust hosted the session “Trusted AI Agents by Design: From Trust Ecosystems to Authority Continuity”, presented by Nicola Gallo.

Over the past couple of years I have written several articles touching on ZTAuth* and PIC. Reading them today, some point in different directions, different angles, different emphasis, different terminology. That is a natural part of how a model evolves when you are building and thinking at the same time.