The ITU has launched the Focus Group on Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI, announced at the AI for Good Global Summit. The group's brief is to develop international frameworks that establish the identity of AI agents, define when their behaviour can be trusted, and preserve meaningful human authority over their actions.
The announcement arrives as AI systems transition from tools that respond to instructions into agents that plan, decide, and act with growing independence. The ITU's concern is concrete: autonomous agents may impersonate people or organisations, take unauthorised actions across interconnected systems, or operate in ways that are difficult to audit after the fact. Without common standards for identity and accountability, each organisation deploying AI agents is effectively solving the same problem in isolation.
The Focus Group will develop common terminology and reference architectures for identity, trust, and agent discovery. It will also produce trust frameworks and lifecycle models, interoperability mechanisms for digital identity and credentials, and a standardisation roadmap intended to coordinate work across expert communities. Membership is open to technical experts, policy specialists, lawyers, and regulators.
The group is co-chaired by Debora Comparin and Amir Banifatemi, and will report to ITU-T Study Group 17, which handles security standards. Its first meeting is scheduled for Paris in November 2026, with a second session in Geneva in January 2027.
Arnaud Taddei, Chair of Study Group 17, described the timing as deliberate: the foundations need to be correct before the technology outpaces the governance.
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