Why Should AI Agents Declare Themselves?

Parag Agrawal says good agents should declare themselves so other people can recognize them and treat them differently from bots that might be adversarial.

Most bad activity never shows up on the surface. An account that looks like a bot is harmless, because anyone can see it. The real problem starts in the margins, when people and the technical teams building the systems can no longer tell a human from a bot or an agent. Agent is the better word, because bot carries a more negative meaning, and agents are perhaps the good bots, mostly. Protocols are already being built to declare identity. The core challenge is whether an agent should inherit a person's full access or only part of it. Getting rid of the bad bots while still letting agents hold the access people already have would be much better. Today Instinct and Muse cannot get the access he has on many websites, because the sites already block them, and they will get even more blocked if they start declaring themselves.

The present is a moment of transition. Rough edges remain partly because incentive alignment is unfinished.