ITU launches Focus Group on Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI

At the AI for Good Global Summit, the International Telecommunication Union unveiled a new working group concerned with trust and identity, covering both people and agentic AI. Its job is to draw up approaches for dependable digital identity and for making sure software agents stay accountable from design through use.

The ITU frames this as a response to AI shifting away from tools that merely assist people toward autonomous agents acting in their name. Alongside productivity gains, it points to dangers such as agents posing as a person or an organisation, or acting without permission across linked systems. The group aims to keep people genuinely in charge of tasks like moving money or running critical infrastructure. Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin said AI's future rests on trust. Co-Chair Debora Comparin said shared international groundwork is needed to settle who agents are and when they merit trust, and Co-Chair Amir Banifatemi stressed that identity and trustworthiness need to be considered together.

Experts in technology as well as policy, law and regulation may take part. The group plans to produce common terminology, reference designs touching identity, trust, finding agents and interoperability, trust frameworks with assurance models spanning an agent's lifecycle, ways for digital credentials to work across systems, security benchmarks for ongoing evaluation of agents, and a standardization roadmap.

It will answer to ITU-T Study Group 17, the body handling security standards, whose chair is Arnaud Taddei. More leaders will be named within weeks. Meetings are set for Paris in November 2026 and Geneva in January 2027. The ITU also lists other active groups, on smart-city AI, embodied AI with multimedia, and networks built around AI.