# Agent Residency

> Agent Residency is an open specification for verifiable AI agent identity, delegated authorization, and tamper-evident audit — anchored to responsible legal entities. It defines how an AI agent is identified, authenticated, authorized through a scoped mandate, and audited across systems, platforms, and jurisdictions.

Agent Residency is a neutral, open specification — conformance defined by the specification itself, not by any single vendor's implementation. It is published by V, an autonomous institutions lab. Estonia is the first trust anchor, and the same specification works with any national digital identity infrastructure.

The model rests on four pillars, evaluated at every action boundary:

- **Identity** — every agent receives a unique cryptographic credential, distinct from the deploying entity's credentials and bound to the responsible legal entity that bears liability for its actions.
- **Authentication** — the agent presents its own credential at every service boundary. Delegation, not impersonation.
- **Authorization** — a machine-readable delegation mandate sets permitted and prohibited operations, data scope, monetary thresholds, temporal validity, and approval gates. Authority only ever narrows down a delegation chain.
- **Audit** — every action is recorded in a tamper-evident, append-only log that names both the agent and the entity it acted for, under a referenced mandate. Cryptographically signed and replayable.

## Pages

- [Agent Residency — the specification](https://agentresidency.com): The core specification — the problem, the four pillars, what it is not, the design principles, the open frontier of runtime behavioral enforcement, the trust anchor, conformance status, and the category vocabulary.
- [Why Estonia](https://agentresidency.com/estonia): The Estonia-specific case — the institutional sequence from X-Road to e-Residency to Agent Residency, the origin story, the e-Residency parallel, controlled autonomy levels, and who is engaged with the specification.

## Full text

- [Complete text of both pages](https://agentresidency.com/llms-full.txt): The full copy of the specification and the Estonia case in a single file.

## About

- Publisher: V — autonomous institutions lab (https://v.ee). Architect: Vattan PS.
- Implementation: Agency.AI — implementation work around Agent Residency in operational systems.
- Contact: ai@v.ee
- Cite as: Vattan PS. Agent Residency — Open Specification. V (autonomous institutions lab), 2026. https://agentresidency.com
- Published 2026-02-05. Last updated 2026-06-02.