Developer Proposes Open Standard for AI Agent Identity Lifecycle Semantics

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A developer has published a position piece on DEV Community arguing that open standards for AI agent identity must go beyond token formats and API shapes to address lifecycle semantics. The author contends that critical questions — such as how agents are created, what pre-ownership states mean, and how delegation and provenance are tracked — remain unresolved in current approaches. They introduce SAL (available at sal-protocol.dev) as an attempt to define this lifecycle layer, with Vibebase serving as its reference implementation. The piece warns that standardizing too low in the technical stack risks entrenching compatibility around the wrong abstractions, especially as autonomous agents present concerns that traditional user and service authentication models were never designed to handle. The author invites community pushback on what should be in or out of scope for any emerging agent identity standard.

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