Agent Trust
Agent trust is the property of a surface that lets an AI agent check its claims against inspectable evidence rather than accept them as asserted. It is the third of the four dimensions of agent readiness, and the one the published agent-readability specifications do not cover.
Definition
Agent trust is the property of a surface that lets an AI agent check its claims against inspectable evidence rather than accept them as asserted.
It is the third of the four dimensions of agent readiness — discoverability, legibility, trust, callability — and the one that determines whether an agent has any basis to rely on what it has successfully read.
What it is not
- Not reputation. Trust here is a property of the surface, not a score attached to the publisher. A well-regarded organisation can publish an uncheckable claim, and the claim remains uncheckable.
- Not authentication. Establishing who published a claim is a different question from whether the claim can be verified.
- Not certification. A badge asserting that someone checked is another assertion, arriving with the same problem it was meant to solve.
- Not legibility. Parse is not the same as rely. An agent that has perfectly parsed a page knows what was claimed, not whether it holds.
Why it is named separately
The published agent-readability specifications concentrate on discovery, structure, and parseability — access rather than warrant. A surface can satisfy every one of them and still give an agent nothing with which to evaluate what it read.
The full contrast, including what the specs do cover and where the gap falls, is on agent readability is not agent trust.
Agent trust is also the dimension that makes governable AI action under human authority possible: governance depends on evidence a human or machine can examine, and a surface offering none can only be taken at its word.
FAQ
- What does "agent trust" mean?
- It means a surface exposes something an AI agent can independently examine, so a claim can be checked rather than believed. It is distinct from whether the agent can find the surface, parse it, or call it — those are the other three readiness dimensions.
- Is agent trust the same as reputation or authentication?
- No. Reputation attaches to a publisher, and authentication establishes who published something. Agent trust is a structural property of the surface itself: either it exposes checkable evidence or it does not, and that is verifiable from outside regardless of who published it.