Verifiable Credentials provide a portable trust layer for AI systems, allowing them to consume structured, authenticated data and act in a dynamic way with provable authority — all without the need for custom integrations or centralized trust. This is what Indicio provides with Indicio ProvenAI.
By Trevor Butterworth and Will Groah
If AI systems are going to deliver business success in 2026, they must be able to safely access high-value data and act across organizational boundaries. To do this, systems and agents need to be:
- Identifiable
- Have access to structured and accurate data in a permissioned and auditable way
- Demonstrate that they have the delegated authority to share this data with other identifiable AI agents and systems.
Three years ago, Indicio identified the need to assign verifiable identity to AI agents using the same decentralized identity technology we created for people, organizations, and devices. This led us to develop Indicio ProvenAI, an infrastructural solution that could be layered into existing systems.
ProvenAI provides seamless authentication and permissioned access to the structured and authenticated data contained in a Verifiable Credential, enabling AI agents and agentic AI to operate dynamically to user requests.
Verifiable Credentials are a container-like solution for sharing structured, trusted data. A Verifiable Credential issuer digitally signs a set of data or claims and sends them to a person, organization, or device in the form of a digital credential to hold in a digital wallet. A digital signature is an electronic, digital stamp that is cryptographically provable. This means that anyone can mathematically confirm who created the stamp and that the stamped data hasn’t been changed, without calling back to the issuer or checking another system. There is no need for direct, custom integrations; instead, you have verifiable information that can be instantly verified and trusted on the spot.
This combination of portability and provability means that trusted data can be easily and inexpensively used across disparate systems. As long as the credentials follow open standards and are interoperable, they can be verified and understood by any system, not just the one that created them.
The interoperability part matters. Some well-known identity verification solutions may issue ‘credentials’ that only work inside their own ecosystem, which limits how useful the data really is. When credentials are built to work across platforms, trusted data can move freely and be reused wherever it’s needed.
AI companies have already been fined under data protection regulations
Businesses and organizations are going to have to contend with the privacy and security implications of AI agents and systems accessing and processing vast amounts of personal and other high-value, high-risk data.
Regulators are often slow to act on new technology, but in this case, GDPR provides a clear template for how personal data needs to be treated. The EU has already issued multi-million dollar fines to AI companies for misusing personal data. The recent, proposed changes to GDPR around AI won’t alter fundamental data privacy and protection requirements.
The beauty of Verifiable Credentials is that — especially the way Indicio implements them — how easily they handle compliance and trust. They do this in ways that are clear, auditable and easy to explain to regulators and users alike.
First, credentials only work when the person or organization holding them explicitly gives permission to access the data. That simple requirement is integral to meeting a key requirement of GDPR and other data protection regulations around consent.
This means they can also provide a way for the credential holder to consent to their data being shared by an AI agent with other AI agents and systems. This is often called delegated authority: it means clear, provable consent that can travel with the data.
Verifiable Credentials also provide ways to share only what’s necessary. You can reveal specific pieces of information, or even prove something is true without revealing the underlying data. This is called selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proofs, which helps meet the data and purpose minimization requirements of data protection regulations, and gives users real data privacy assurance.
Finally, they provide a seamless way for agent-to-user and agent-to-agent authentication, so both users and AI agents can verify who they are interacting with. That helps prevent fake AI agents and fake users from entering the system, which is becoming a growing risk as AI use expands.
The move from deterministic to dynamic interaction
As a recent article by Vatsal Gupta for IASCA points out, the infrastructural ground has shifted with AI:
“The identity and access management (IAM) infrastructures that organizations rely upon today were built for human beings and fixed service accounts. They were not designed to manage autonomous AI systems that can reason about goals, make independent decisions, and dynamically adapt their actions. However, that is precisely the management agentic artificial intelligence (AI) demands.”
And a recent paper (Singh et al.) points to the scale of transformation and what that entails:
“Autonomous AI agents are rapidly becoming foundational across domains from cloud-native assistants and robotics to decentralized systems and edge-based IoT controllers. These agents act independently, make decisions, and collaborate at scale. As agent populations grow into the billions across heterogeneous platforms and administrative boundaries, the ability to identify, discover, and trust agents in real time has emerged as a critical infrastructure challenge.”
Companies and organizations can respond to these opportunities and challenges in two ways: They can attempt to mitigate these problems after they have built these systems or build in accountability and operational interoperability from the start.
Solving these problems now mitigates the risk of a retrofit being costly, time-consuming, and complex. But it’s not just about risk. One of the decentralized identity’s most powerful features is decentralized governance, a simple way to establish trust in a network and prescribe workflows.
Indicio is a pioneer in decentralized governance, helping to develop the Decentralized Identity Foundation’s Credential Trust Establishment specification. Decentralized governance means that the natural authority for a given credential use case publishes a machine-readable file for every participant in the network. The file contains a “trust list” of approved credential issuers and, if needed, verifying parties. It also establishes what information needs to be presented by a credential holder to a verifier.
In this way, users and AI agents can instantly recognize and verify each other as legitimate credential holders as the credentials come from issuers listed in their governance files.
This is an enormously powerful feature. Decentralized governance enables interoperable credential systems to work with each other and scale into larger trust networks. It removes the need for, and friction of, an independent trust registry, and in doing so, it provides a powerful foundation for scripting trust in fully automated systems and trusted interaction with other fully automated systems.
Indicio ProvenAI’s governance solution makes it easy to build and scale interoperable trust networks for AI agents and systems so that they can reliably identify each other, share permissions, and operate across organizations.
Indicio + NVIDIA Inception
Indicio is a market-leader in Verifiable Credential technology. In 2025, we joined NVIDIA’s Inception program to develop Indicio ProvenAI, a practical, easy-to-deploy trust and compliance layer for AI systems.
We are providing the foundation that lets autonomous AI networks and systems operate efficiently and effectively, with clear identity, permissions, and governance, while working seamlessly alongside the Verifiable Credential systems already used by people and organizations. Interoperability is where we’ve led the market, and it’s what makes us the bridge to a seamless, secure human-AI world.
If you’re building or deploying AI today, this is the moment to put decentralized identity and verifiable data in place before scale makes it harder and more expensive. A ProvenAI license from Indicio will give you a fast, standards-based path to move forward with confidence.
