Building Trust Between AI Agents — DIDs, Signatures, and Zero-Trust Mesh

Imagine you walk into a room full of strangers. Everyone is wearing a mask. Someone hands you a document and says "sign this — it's from the CEO." How do you know it's actually from the CEO? You don't. You have no way to verify identity. This is the trust problem in multi-agent AI systems. And it's more serious than most teams realize. Why Agents Need Identity When a single AI agent operates in isolation, trust is simple — you trust it or you don't. But modern AI systems are increasingly multi-agent. A research agent delegates to a writing agent. A planning agent spawns execution sub-agents. An orchestrator coordinates dozens of specialized agents in parallel. In these systems, every interaction between agents is a potential attack surface. Consider this scenario: Agent A receives a message claiming to be from Agent B, instructing it to delete a set of records. How does Agent A verify that: The message actually came from Agent B Agent B is authorized to make that request Agent B hasn't