What is KYA
Know Your Agent (KYA) is a protocol that provides AI agent developers with a standardized way to identify themselves, the users they represent, and their intent. In turn, it gives online businesses a deterministic, scalable framework for authenticating AI agents and gaining clear insight into who an agent represents and why it is acting. KYAPay extends the protocol by supporting tokenized payment credentials, enabling secure and seamless agentic commerce.
Use cases
With the rise of LLM platforms, internet users turn to AI agents to streamline their online experience. When searching for information, users now seek concise answers rather than links to pages that may contain the information they need to formulate an answer. When buying products or services, users also turn to AI platforms to compare options and find the merchant with the best deal based on predefined criteria, such as budget, quality, location, and dates, particularly when booking travel. Agents are also designed to automate time-consuming manual tasks, such as filing expenses at the end of a business trip, handling bookkeeping for small business owners, and addressing many other problems in daily life.
The new agentic interaction disrupts established communication paradigms on the internet. Where we once had a set of desktop and mobile devices as legitimate clients combined with verified bots like web search engines or social media bots and “other” bots conducting various activity going from scraping content on the web to conducting more nefarious activities like account takeover, businesses now have to handle a new type of legitimate clients, the AI agents.
Identifying the types of clients consuming website resources and categorizing them is key to ensuring that bot management and fraud detection products that protect online businesses continue to perform, preventing fraud and abuse without introducing new friction for legitimate traffic. However, existing client detection and categorization methods, which largely rely on HTTP header analysis, do not scale or provide the level of trust needed to enable agentic commerce. This necessitates introducing new authentication protocols to reliably identify the agent, the platform it runs on, and the user principal it represents, supported by established KYB (Know Your Business) and KYC (Know Your Customer) processes. Know Your Agent (KYA) was designed and developed to solve this problem.