The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency for digital technologies, today announced a new initiative to develop frameworks for trusted digital identity and to ensure that the behaviour of AI agents remains trustworthy and accountable throughout their lifecycle.
The new ITU Focus Group on Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI , announced at the AI for Good Global Summit , comes as artificial intelligence (AI) evolves quickly beyond assistive tools and increasingly into autonomous agents acting on behalf of people.
While agentic AI promises major gains in productivity, it also introduces new risks ranging from autonomous agents impersonating people or organizations, to taking unauthorized actions across interconnected systems. The ITU Focus Group will address these challenges by developing frameworks that preserve meaningful human control for tasks such as executing financial transactions and operating critical infrastructure.
"The future of AI depends on trust," said ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin. "As AI becomes more autonomous, we need to work together across industry, governments, academia and civil society to ensure the greatest possible confidence in AI systems."
As AI systems plan and act with growing independence, the ability to establish an agent's identity and whether its behaviour can be trusted becomes critical.
Increasingly, AI agents need to identify and authenticate one another. Just as importantly, their decisions and actions must remain accountable, controllable and trustworthy.
Identity systems establish who is acting, while trustworthiness determines whether that actor is reliable. Together they provide the foundation for safe interaction between humans and autonomous AI systems.
The Focus Group will address the challenges of trust management for people and AI agents, the overall trustworthiness of agentic AI systems, and ways to strengthen confidence in how AI agents behave while retaining authority over their actions.
"AI agents will soon negotiate, transact and make decisions on our behalf," said Focus Group Co-Chair Debora Comparin. "Before that future becomes reality, we need common international foundations that establish who these agents are, when they can be trusted, and how people will remain in control. That is the challenge this Focus Group has been created to address."
"Agentic AI introduces a new class of digital actors that will increasingly collaborate with people and one another," said Co-Chair Amir Banifatemi. "Identity tells us who is acting and trustworthiness tells us how that actor can be expected to behave. Bringing these together creates the common foundation needed for interoperable, accountable, and trusted AI systems at global scale."
The group is open to technical experts as well as specialists in policy, law and regulation to develop:
- common terminology and definitions;
- reference architectures for identity, trust, agent discovery, and interoperability;
- trust frameworks and lifecycle (assurance) models;
- interoperability mechanisms for digital identity and credentials;
- security criteria and benchmarks for the continuous assessment of AI agents; and,
- a standardization roadmap to coordinate action across expert communities.
The Focus Group will report to ITU's expert group for security standards, ITU-T Study Group 17 .
"We are moving strategically and swiftly but deliberately taking the time to get the foundations right," said Arnaud Taddei, Chair of Study Group 17. "We know the direction and broadly what we want to build. We are now assembling the right leadership and structure, and AI for Good is exactly where we will meet the partners that would like to join us."
The group's Co-Chairs will be joined by a larger leadership team being finalized in the coming weeks following broad consultation. The group, which is open to all interested experts, will hold its first meeting in Paris in November 2026 and its second in Geneva in January 2027.
ITU Focus Groups help accelerate the development of new global standards and have been used extensively to keep pace with the fast-evolving AI landscape.
"The consensus we build while developing ITU standards creates the clarity we need for new innovation ecosystems to grow," said Seizo Onoe, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. "This focus group is an open platform designed to help everyone move forward with confidence and certainty."
Other active Focus Groups are addressing AI for smart cities, embodied AI and multimedia, and AI-native networks. Past Focus Groups on AI have explored autonomous networks, health, agriculture, disaster risk reduction and self-driving cars.
