Verifiable LEI model answers who sent an AI agent, what it can do, and for how long

An article from Alexandre Kech, CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), explores how a trust layer of verifiable organizational identity is critical to agentic payments, offering a complement to GLEIF’s new discussion paper, “Agentic AI in Payments: Establishing Interoperable Trust and Control.”

Kech calls the shift to support agent-initiated transactions unprecedented in scale. Agents are discovering services, negotiating terms and initiating payments, increasingly among themselves. Yet there remains an infrastructure gap in the capability to prove, at machine speed, “which organization stands behind an agent and who authorized it to act.”

Financial services leads the way in agentic AI deployments, but Kech says the addressable market touches payments, trade and supply chains, digital assets, and government services.  “Yet, across all these sectors, the same questions persist: who should give an organization’s agent authority to act, and how can a counterparty verify that authority has been granted?”

The legal architectures to answer these questions exist, but “the challenge is to translate established legal principles into technical and operational practices that agents can execute.”

vLEI model creates cryptographic trust chain

Kech says the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) model provides verified organizational identity for the digital domain, “so counterparties can computationally verify the identity, authority, and role of a person, or an agent, acting on behalf of a legal entity.”

“It sits above device and agent identity as the organizational trust layer, and it complements the work being done at the device and individual credential level.”

Using a cryptographic trust chain that leads back to a verified individual within a verified organization, vLEI wires accountability into each agentic transaction, providing machine-readable proof of the legal identity of whatever organization an agent acts for, what authority has been delegated to that agent, and the boundaries of its authority.

“When those can be verified computationally, accountability stops depending on trust and starts depending on evidence,” Kech says. He argues that governing agents with this partitioned authority model – controlling which agent can do what, under whose mandate, for how long, and according to what limitations – “is much more efficient than arming each agent with its own distinct identity.”

As the GLEIF paper puts it, “to function safely at scale, these ecosystems require more than digital identity alone. They require mechanisms to establish verifiable organizational identity, express and manage delegated authority, enforce machine-readable policies at runtime, generate auditable records, and support privacy-preserving yet compliant execution across multiple platforms.”

Article Topics

agentic commerce  |  AI agents  |  digital identity  |  GLEIF  |  Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)