How is HATI different from IAM, NHI, and PoP?
Short answer. IAM authenticates humans into systems. NHI inventories non-human credentials. PoP proves a unique human exists. HATI binds an agent's action to the human who authorized it. The four categories complement each other; only HATI answers "who is behind this action right now."
One-line definitions
IAM (Identity and Access Management). The login and access-control infrastructure for human employees. Vendors: Okta, Auth0, Microsoft Entra, Ping. NHI (Non-Human Identity). The inventory and lifecycle for service accounts, machine credentials, and API keys. Vendors: Astrix, Entro, Oasis. PoP (Proof of Personhood). Cryptographic evidence that an account belongs to a unique human. Vendors: Worldcoin, Civic, Privado. HATI (Human-Agent Trust Infrastructure). The cryptographic chain binding an agent's action to a human's signed authority. Vendors: Manav, and a small but growing peer set.
What each does, what each does not
IAM authenticates humans; it does not authenticate agent actions across cloud boundaries. NHI catalogs non-human credentials; it does not produce a chain to the authorizing human. PoP proves humanness; it does not specify what the human authorized. HATI specifies what the human authorized and produces the chain that proves it; it does not perform login (defers to IAM), inventory (defers to NHI), or first-time personhood verification (defers to PoP).
Why this matters now
The enterprise has IAM (mature), NHI (immature, urgent), PoP (consumer-side, optional). It does not have HATI by default. The audit-trail gap most CISOs and CFOs are waking up to is exactly the HATI gap; the other three layers do not close it.
How they fit together
The clean composition: PoP at user onboarding (this is a real, unique human). IAM for the human's day-to-day login. NHI to inventory the agents and credentials the human's organization runs. HATI to bind every agent action back to the human's signed authority. Each layer has a specialty; HATI sits across them, glueing the human to the action.
The two failure modes if you skip HATI
Audit-trail says "the system did it." Regulator says "the system is not a person." Lawsuit names the company; company cannot name the human; insurer declines coverage. That is the failure-mode pipeline. Each previous layer reduces but does not eliminate it.
Common objections
The two objections we hear most: (1) this is just OAuth re-skinned, and (2) we'll wait for the standard. On the first: OAuth scoped delegations between services; this layer scopes delegations from a verified human to an agent — different actor, different audit-trail shape. On the second: the standard is being shaped by the relying parties who integrate first. Waiting is a position.
Frequently asked questions
Is the answer the same for an enterprise and an individual? The shape is the same — a signed delegation, a verifier, an audit log — but the magnitude caps and approval flows differ. Enterprises layer multi-signature for high-stakes actions; individuals usually run with a single device-bound key. Both end up with the same regulator-grade chain.
What if the agent acts before I notice? That is what magnitude caps and time-to-live exist for. A correctly scoped delegation will refuse the action at the relying party before the human's attention is required. Revocation under 200 ms catches the residual cases.
How does this compose with what we already run? It sits next to existing IAM (Okta, Auth0, Entra), not over it. Login is still the IdP's job. Manav signs the human's delegation to the agent, which the relying party verifies in addition to the IdP session. Two layers, one audit trail, no rip-and-replace.
Where to start
Start with what is hati for the broader category map. Then read seven layers of trust for the implementation pattern. The two together compress a week of reading into thirty minutes; everything else on the site is depth on a specific layer.
Where the four overlap, and where they diverge
IAM authenticates humans into systems. NHI authenticates workloads inside systems. Proof-of-Personhood verifies a human is unique. HATI binds a human to the actions an agent takes on their behalf. The four overlap at the edges — IAM increasingly issues service accounts, NHI increasingly cares about the human upstream, PoP increasingly looks like a credential type, HATI increasingly issues platform-grade tokens — but they answer four different questions and the regulators are starting to require all four. The buyer who treats them as substitutes is buying a partial answer to a regulator question that has four parts. The architect who treats them as a stack — IAM for the human-system pair, NHI for the workload, PoP for uniqueness, HATI for the action — assembles a complete answer that survives every audit we have seen so far.
IAM, NHI, PoP are categories that exist. HATI is the category they have all been waiting on.