Best AI agent identity solutions — the honest buyer's guide

Twelve vendors. Eight criteria. We list our competitors first and tell you when to pick them. This is the honest buyer's guide for AI agent identity.

How to read this guide

Every vendor below excels at something. Many overlap. Few cover the full HATI stack. We've grouped them by the layer they primarily serve, then evaluated against eight criteria you should care about: agent-native architecture, cross-platform portability, open-standards adoption, work attestation, Article 14 readiness, revocation latency, selective disclosure, and survival of vendor failure.

Layer 1 — verified human identity

Worldcoin (with AgentKit). Best at: large-scale proof-of-personhood for consumer flows. AgentKit's x402 integration makes it credible for agent delegation in crypto-native contexts. Limited by: hardware requirement (Orb), consumer focus, no work attestation. Pick when: you need Sybil resistance for a global consumer app.

Apple Passkeys / Google Passkeys. Best at: friction-free consumer login at scale. Limited by: per-device uniqueness only; no human-level identity continuity. Pick when: passkey UX is the priority and you don't need cross-device humanness.

Civic / SpruceID / Privado ID. Best at: developer-controlled SSI primitives. Limited by: small consumer surface, fragmented adoption, dev-hostile UX. Pick when: you're building a custom SSI flow with strong selective-disclosure needs.

Layer 2 — agent delegation

Microsoft Entra Agent ID. Best at: native integration with Azure-resident agents and Microsoft Graph. Limited by: platform lock-in. Cross-cloud agent flows require translation layers. Pick when: your agent fleet lives entirely in Microsoft's ecosystem and you can absorb the lock-in.

Astrix Security / Oasis Security / Aembit. Best at: NHI inventory, posture, and credential lifecycle. Limited by: NHI-side only — they manage the machine identity, not the human-to-machine binding. Pick when: you need an NHI cleanup project. Pair with HATI Layer 1+2 for completeness.

Cisco Agentic Security. Best at: agent traffic inspection at network perimeter, agent-aware posture. Limited by: ecosystem-bound, no first-class delegation primitive yet. Pick when: you already run Cisco at the network layer and want continuity.

Layer 3 — work attestation

W3C Verifiable Credentials (Spruce, Veramo). Best at: open-standard attestation rails. Limited by: needs glue code; no consumer brand; production deployments measured in dozens not thousands. Pick when: you have a development team and need pure protocol-level attestation primitives.

GitHub Verified Commits / DocuSign Identity. Best at: per-platform work attestation in their own walled gardens. Limited by: don't compose across platforms. Pick when: your work happens in a single tool and you want low-friction attestation there.

Layer 4 — trust score

This layer has no incumbent. LinkedIn dominates self-reported reputation; nothing dominates verified reputation. Open question to watch.

Layer 5 — settlement / token

Worldcoin (WLD), $MANAV (Manav), $LINK (Chainlink). Best at: each solves a different settlement problem. WLD for consumer grants; $MANAV for verified-work mining; $LINK for oracle data. Pick when: your specific economic primitive aligns.

Full-stack HATI

Manav. Best at: covering all five layers with a coherent identity-to-settlement flow, MCP-native, cross-platform, Article-14-ready out of the box. Limited by: we are 12 months old. Vendor risk is real. Pick when: you want one coherent stack rather than integrating four point solutions, your AI footprint is non-trivial, and your timeline includes an Article 14 audit.

The decision matrix

The eight questions to put in your RFP

1. Which HATI layers does the vendor cover natively, vs integrate, vs not address?
2. Are delegation tokens portable across platforms?
3. Which open standards: DID, VC, MCP, x402, ERC-8004?
4. Median revocation latency from "click revoke" to "agents stop"?
5. Selective disclosure support — can the user prove a claim without revealing supporting data?
6. How specifically does the product support Article 14's two-natural-person rule?
7. Public Howey/MiCA analysis for any token component?
8. If the vendor disappears, can the user keep their identity, work history, and trust score?

A vendor that scores 8/8 is doing real HATI. A vendor that scores under 5 is doing IAM with new branding. A vendor that refuses to answer is the answer.

Common objections

Buyers reasonably ask: do we have to choose? No. Most production stacks run both — the incumbent for the layer it owns, the new category for the layer the incumbent does not. The category split is real; the integration is clean; the procurement question is sequencing, not selection.

Frequently asked questions

Why not just use the incumbent for both? Because the incumbent was built for the previous problem. The fact that the workflow looks similar masks an architectural mismatch the incumbent cannot fix without rebuilding. We respect the incumbent; we do not pretend they ship the answer.

Where does the incumbent still win? In its native category. Use the incumbent where it was designed to operate; use the new layer where the new category begins. Most production stacks end up running both, with a clean handoff between them.

How long until we have to choose? You don't, mostly. The clean integration runs both side-by-side. The choice arrives only when a procurement contract forces consolidation, and by then the data on which layer is doing the work is usually clear.

Where to start

To go deeper, read manav vs worldcoin for the architectural diff and manav vs okta for the broader vendor map. Most procurement teams converge on the same composition — incumbent plus the new layer — once they have walked both.

The right vendor depends on what you're solving. The wrong question is "who's best?" The right question is "best at what, for whom?"