KYA
Know Your Agent
The open Protocol for Transparent and Trustworthy Agentic Commerce
In Collaboration with
What is KYA
Know Your Agent (KYA) is a protocol that provides AI agent developers with a standardized way to identify themselves, the platform they are running on, and the users they represent. In turn, it gives online businesses a deterministic, scalable framework to authenticate AI agents and gain clear insight into who an agent represents and why it is acting. KYAPay extends the protocol by declaring the user intent and supporting tokenized payment credentials, enabling secure and seamless agentic commerce.
Use cases
As large language model (LLM) platforms grow, people increasingly rely on AI agents for quick answers, product comparisons, buying products, and automating everyday tasks. This shift changes how businesses handle online traffic, introducing AI agents as a new category of legitimate clients alongside humans and traditional bots. Existing bot and fraud detection methods aren’t sufficient to distinguish and trust these agents, creating challenges for fraud and abuse prevention and user experience. To address this, new authentication approaches—combining identity verification for businesses, users, and agents—are needed, leading to the development of the Know Your Agent (KYA) protocol.