Analysis
AAIF organized Identity & Trust into its foundation, the AGNTCon keynotes are saturated with permissions and delegation language, and the specs that would make any of it portable are still unshipped. The convergence is real. The implementation is not.
The October identity convergence is no longer a theory; it is the default trust architecture of the agent stack. While the industry continues to map the control planes of agent infrastructure (as evidenced by the official program for AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, taking place October 22-23, 2026, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center with 3,500+ attendees, 1,000+ organizations, and 150+ talks across 11 tracks), the underlying consensus has shifted toward identity-first design. This convergence is confirmed by the program at AGNTCon and the foundational structure of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).
The ordering of this stack has a simple cost explanation. PYMNTS Intelligence data from September 2026 shows that 93% of merchants believe AI or agent providers should bear the financial loss when an agent makes an incorrect purchase, yet only 28% are willing to offer their full product range under current terms. Because merchants are currently unwilling to bear the financial loss for agent-driven errors, the industry has prioritized identity, intent, and signaling ahead of settlement. This explains why protocols like the Personal Agent Protocol (v0.1 text promised for later in October, still unshipped), Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol focus on authentication and consumer control rather than direct payment execution.
The AAIF, a Linux Foundation directed fund, has codified this priority. Its working-group structure includes eight groups, such as Interoperability, Commerce, and Governance/Risk/Regulatory. The Identity & Trust working group focuses on portable identity, dynamic trust, delegation protocols, and permissions flow across agent-to-agent interactions. While this focus is mirrored in the keynote program for AGNTCon, it is important to note that identity is not among the nine named breakout tracks; two of the eleven tracks remain unconfirmed in public listings.
Keynote speakers are framing identity as the essential prerequisite for a functional agent economy. Bradley Axen of Block has emphasized the need for shared context and durable identity to ensure permissions carry across tools. Abhishek Choudhary of TrueFoundry advocates for swapping real secrets for short-lived, scoped credentials, arguing that the fix for trustworthy agents lies outside the agent’s code. Rao Surapaneni of Google Cloud describes open standards as a means to turn governance into an enabling platform, while Solo.io’s keynote highlights the necessity of consistent security and observability across shared infrastructure. Even the Tokenomics Foundation has noted that every autonomous agent is effectively an autonomous buyer, reinforcing the link between identity and value.
However, a significant gap remains between this architectural consensus and actual implementation. The specifications required to make identity truly portable remain unshipped. Furthermore, distribution layers like Docker Agent provide OCI-based packaging but offer no native trust semantics, permission manifests, or guarantees for sub-agent references. In the absence of these standards, the vacuum is being filled by proprietary vendor extensions, which threatens to fragment the stack.
Commerce and governance are where that gap turns into money. The PYMNTS asymmetry is the constraint the rest of the stack bends around: 93% of merchants believe providers should bear the loss when an agent makes an incorrect purchase, and only 28% are willing to offer their full product range under current terms. Identity, intent, and signaling are being built ahead of settlement because merchants will not underwrite agent error, and the trust semantics now in flight (delegation protocols, permissions flow, portable identity) decide who bears which cost when an agent acts. The MCP and the AAIF working groups are building toward those semantics, but until the specifications move from RFC to implementation, proprietary extensions fill the gap on whatever terms their vendors set. The Personal Agent Protocol v0.1, still unshipped, stays the near-term bellwether: if its text lands and aligns with the AAIF groups, the industry gets a common way to assign those costs; if it slips again, merchants stay where the PYMNTS data puts them, unwilling to sell fully into a channel that can buy wrong at their expense.
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Blair Hayes works for Forkast.
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