Authed is an identity and authentication system built specifically for AI agents. As AI agents become active participants on the internet, they need secure, scalable ways to identify themselves and authenticate with each other across different systems and organizations.

Traditional authentication methods like OAuth and API keys were designed for human users and applications, forcing agents to rely on static credentials that don't scale with the dynamic nature of AI interactions. Authed solves this problem by giving agents their own identity.

Authed is a developer-first, open-source protocol that:

• Provides unique identities for AI agents
• Enables secure agent-to-agent authentication across different ecosystems
• Eliminates the need for static credentials
• Removes human bottlenecks from authentication workflows
• Dynamically enforces access policies between trusted entities

Get up and running with Authed in three simple steps:

Head over to getauthed.dev and create an account. You'll receive:

• A Provider ID (unique identifier for your organization)
• A Provider Secret (keep this safe!)

pip install authed

# This command will:
# - Generate a secure key pair for your agent
# - Create a new agent under your provider
# - Set up your .env with all required configuration
authed init setup --provider-id "your-provider-id" --provider-secret "your-provider-secret"

That's it! Your agent is ready to authenticate. Check out the Basic Integration section below for usage examples.

Here's a minimal example using FastAPI:

from fastapi import FastAPI, Request
from authed import Authed, verify_fastapi, protect_httpx
import httpx

app = FastAPI()

# Initialize Authed from environment variables (configured by `authed init setup`)
auth = Authed.from_env()

# Protected endpoint
@app.post("/secure-endpoint")
@verify_fastapi
async def secure_endpoint(request: Request):
    return {"message": "Authenticated!"}

# Making authenticated requests
@app.get("/call-other-agent")
@protect_httpx()
async def call_other_agent():
    async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
        response = await client.post(
            "http://other-agent/secure-endpoint",
            headers={"target-agent-id": "target-agent-uuid"},
            json={"message": "Hello!"}
        )
    return response.json()

Configure Authed using environment variables:

# Registry and agent configuration
AUTHED_REGISTRY_URL="https://api.getauthed.dev"
AUTHED_AGENT_ID="your-agent-id"
AUTHED_AGENT_SECRET="your-agent-secret"

# Keys for signing and verifying requests
AUTHED_PRIVATE_KEY="your-private-key"
AUTHED_PUBLIC_KEY="your-public-key"

For more detailed documentation, visit our official documentation.

Authed is built specifically for the way AI agents interact - dynamic, distributed, and requiring minimal human intervention.

Our protocol uses robust cryptographic signatures and verification mechanisms to ensure agents only interact with trusted entities.

As your ecosystem of agents grows, Authed scales with you - no need to manage ever-growing lists of API keys or credentials.

We are working hard on new features!

• Self-hosted registries: Adding support and documentation for self-hosting registries
• Registry interoperability: Expanding registry to make them interoperable, allowing agents to authenticate across registries with the same ID
• Instance-based IDs: Adding support for instance-based identities
• Instance binding: Adding instance binding to agent IDs
• OpenID integration: Adding OpenID identity binding for end users
• Enhanced permissions: Expanding the permission engine to allow more fine-grained permissions