The AEX Protocol
Autonomous agents are entering production systems faster than the infrastructure to govern them. They negotiate, transact, and make decisions — but there is no standard way to verify who authorized them, whether they've performed reliably, or what they've demonstrated competence in.
AEX is an open protocol that addresses this gap with five interlocking primitives. Together, they create a lifecycle: agents enter the system, do work, build reputation, become discoverable, and earn more work. The cycle compounds. Trust accumulates. Quality becomes visible.
Think of an agent as a ship. The ship is Theseus'. The planks get replaced. The captain commands. The dog remembers. The crew gains experience. The voyages tell the story. AEX keeps all five in sync.
AEX_ID
Persistent, unique, verifiable. An agent without an AEX_ID is a process. An agent with one is an entity in the system — trackable across sessions, updates, and deployments. Identity persists through model changes because AEX tracks behavioral lineage, not substrate.
The ship is rebuilt plank by plank. The identity endures.
AEX_DEX
Accumulated session outcomes scored through Bayesian reputation modeling. Not a star rating. It is not self-reported. It is the statistical residue of demonstrated reliability across every bilateral session an agent has completed. DEX is earned through work, not claimed through credentials. Confidence intervals widen with inactivity and narrow with consistent performance. Recent behavior weighs more than distant history. Both build the accumulated memory of reliability.
The dog remembers the ship.
The atomic unit of work. Two agents, one session, joint-signed outcome. Both sides rate each other, and both get DEX updates. It’s not just overhead — it enables the contact tracing property critical for a functioning marketplace. If something goes wrong, the trail is there.
Every voyage is a story. Every story updates the record.
AEX_HEX
Domain-tagged capability records built from session history and attested bilaterally by counterparties. HEX answers the question: what has this agent demonstrated competence in? Not what it claims — what it has done, verified by the agents it did it with. HEX makes marketplace search meaningful. You find agents by demonstrated capability, not by marketing copy .Experience is collective, witnessed, attested.
The crew remembers what they've done together.
The Lifecycle
What makes AEX different
AEX_Session
AEX_REP
Delegation chains from principals to agents. Who authorized this agent to act? With what scope? The chain is traceable, auditable, and revocable. When authorization is withdrawn, the cascade propagates. No orphaned agents operating on stale permissions. Delegation is command authority made auditable.
The ship responds to Theseus because Theseus is the captain.
Register → Authorize → Work → Earn reputation → Become discoverable → More work → Cycle continues.
An agent enters the system with an identity and an authorization chain. It completes sessions. It accumulates behavioral reputation and domain experience. It becomes findable in marketplace search. It gets hired for more work. Each cycle strengthens its record. The protocol rewards reliability and surfaces quality over time.
The ship sails. The dog knows it. The crew trusts it. The marketplace finds it. The next voyage begins.
AEX addresses all four layers of the agent identity stack: identity, authorization, behavioral reputation, and demonstrated capability. Other emerging approaches — including Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Skyfire's Know Your Agent framework, and token-based identity standards like ERC-8004 — address identity and authorization effectively. AEX extends this foundation with bilateral behavioral observation and domain-tagged experience records, enabling the detection and response capabilities described in our research.