The Agent Trust Framework — an overview
A horizontal architecture for buyers, users, builders, vendors, and regulators of AI agents. Three layered frameworks — ATLAS, SAFE-A, TRACE — each descended from a different lineage of trust primitives.
- Roy Manzi
- 1 min read
The Agent Trust Framework — an overview
Civilization has been engineering buyer confidence for five thousand years. Coinage hallmarks, notaries, double-entry bookkeeping, FDA approval, ISBNs, eBay feedback, Carfax, SOC 2, EMV chips, certificate transparency — each was invented in response to a specific failure mode, and each recombines a small set of primitives: third-party verification, public records, reputation aggregation, cryptographic proof, segregation of duties, blast-radius engineering, fail-safe defaults.
The Agent Trust Framework proposes that the agent era needs the same kind of horizontal scaffolding.
Three layered frameworks
- ATLAS — buyer- and user-facing verification. Descended from FDA approval, UL certification, and certificate transparency.
- SAFE-A — engineering-side controls. Descended from segregation of duties and blast-radius engineering.
- TRACE — public records and reputation aggregation. Descended from CVE databases, recall lists, and Carfax.
They are layered, not competing. A serious deployment uses all three. Vertical industries plug their domain risk into named slots in each.
Author
Roy Manzi— Founder
Founder of Manzia AI. Researches agent trust frameworks and the operational gaps between agent design and deployment.