Agentic AI needs to be bound to human identity; Anonybit offers a solution

“The only way to prove human identity in the digital world is with biometrics:” so says C. Maxine Most in a post on her LinkedIn account, addressing the threat presented by AI agents as outlined in new research from Palo Alto Networks. Cybersecurity experts, Most argues, have been “obsessively focused on machine identity to the exclusion of human identity. And now agentic AI is breaking cybersecurity because there is no strong human identity verification capability built in at the foundational level.”

AI agents, or agentic AI, are among the newest tools to emerge from the would-be AI boom. With novelty comes vulnerability: when Palo Alto Networks ran real-world attack simulations on two identical AI agents running on different frameworks (CrewAI and Microsoft AutoGen), both failed the test.

Anonybit ensuring agents are accountable

Biometrics and decentralized digital ID firms are responding with innovations in identity-bound agents.

“Without identity binding, organizations face significant risks: fraudulent orders, unauthorized approvals, compliance violations, and data misuse,” says a release from Anonybit. The firm is claiming first-to-market for an “agentic AI framework that goes beyond authentication – enabling secure, authorized, and accountable agentic flows across commerce, payments, and supply chain management.”

Working in partnership with SmartUp, a no-code platform for deploying enterprise AI agents, Anonybit says its decentralized platform is “the world’s first decentralized infrastructure that binds identity to agents – authenticating users, authorizing actions and issuing cryptographically secure identity tokens across the lifecycle of any agentic flow.”

Frances Zelazny, Co-Founder and CEO of Anonybit, says “agentic commerce holds incredible promise for efficiency and scale, but without identity, it also introduces serious risks around trust, fraud, and control. With SmartUp, we’re proving that identity-bound agents can operate in production, not just in theory. Our decentralized biometric cloud, data vault, and token management system form the missing identity layer the enterprise needs to build trust, ensure accountability, and future-proof agent-driven automation.”

Anonybit’s decentralized biometric cloud supports all major biometric modalities (face, voice, finger, iris, palm) for authentication and step-up verification without storing any biometric data in one place. It says the SmartUp use case shows how identity-bound agents can authenticate enterprise users or customers initiating actions, bind agents to those identities using biometrics and privacy-preserving credentials, authorize specific tasks via scoped identity tokens and integrations with orchestration platforms, and provide real-time auditability and enforce zero trust across workflows.

“SmartUp is pioneering agentic automation in core business functions like order management and supply chain management, and our customers are already seeing the benefits of secure, identity-bound agents,” said Moishe Shemtov, country manager for SmartUp. “With Anonybit’s identity infrastructure, we ensure our agents are not only autonomous, but accountable.”

Amani launches AI agent to automate compliance in real time

Amani is an AI-driven compliance platform based at the Dubai International Financial Center’s AI Campus. A release says it has launched an “intelligent compliance assistant designed to automate KYC, KYB, and AML processes across regulated industries.”

Based on Amani’s own large language model and trained on five years of proprietary AI outputs, the Amani Agent “stays in sync with local laws and regulatory updates across jurisdictions,” automating identity checks and source verification, applying jurisdiction-specific regulations and assigning real-time risk scores.

“Compliance hasn’t evolved fast enough for the businesses it’s meant to support,” says Hamid Khan, CEO of Amani. “It’s still slow, inconsistent, and built around fragmented tools. The Amani Agent brings all of that together in one place, fast, auditable, and regulator-friendly by design. We built this to take real pressure off compliance teams, without cutting corners.

The product is currently in beta rollout with selected banks and crypto exchanges in the UAE. Amani plans to expand to “the UK and other jurisdictions.”

Au10tix “an ideal match for AI agents”

Au10tix gets a nod in a recent Microsoft presentation on building autonomous agents in Copilot Studio. A hypothetical insurance claims processing scenario is used to demonstrate how Au10tix is “an ideal match for AI agents” built with Copilot. Microsoft highlights Au10tix’s ability to automatically verify identities and documents across industries, and suggests the two parties are working on “a transformative ID and document verification solution.”

Article Topics

AI agents  |  Amani  |  Anonybit  |  AU10TIX  |  biometric binding  |  biometrics  |  cybersecurity  |  digital trust  |  Maxine Most