Theme Name

ATHENA: Telco-Grade Identity and Delegation Architecture for Agentic AI

Proposer(s)

Gianpaolo Angelo Scalone (Vodafone)

Summary

ATHENA starts from telco-grade identity and trust architecture to study how AI agents can be anchored to an accountable root, receive constrained authority through verifiable delegation, and remain governable throughout their lifecycle.
Telecommunications provide a concrete starting point for examining identity anchoring, large-scale provisioning, federation, policy control and revocation. The theme would identify which architectural principles can support interoperable agent identity across telco and non-telco trust domains.

Scope / Open Questions

How can a telco-grade identity authority anchor an agent to an accountable human or organization without exposing that principal’s identity unnecessarily?
How are agent identities issued, delegated to sub-agents, constrained and verified across a chain of authority?
How can each delegation preserve or reduce, but never silently expand, the authority granted by its parent?
How are agent identities provisioned, suspended, expired, revoked and recovered after compromise?
How can delegated authority be verified across operators, services and jurisdictions?
Which identity and lifecycle signals must be available to authorization and enforcement points?
What can be learned from telco identity, SIM/eSIM-backed trust, federation and operational lifecycle models, and what must change for agents that are not tied to a device or mobile subscription?
Which elements of this telco-grade architecture can be adopted by other accountable identity providers?

Related Work

ITU-T XSTR.ATHENA, which provides the initial telco-grade architectural work on root-bound identity, hierarchical delegation, lifecycle governance, federation and accountability.
Relevant work on agent authorization, workload identity, attestation and verifiable credentials, to be assessed as potential building blocks rather than assumed to provide the complete architecture.

Related Themes

10, Network-Native Governance and Trust Enforcement: how trusted infrastructure governs and enforces agent behaviour. ATHENA: where an agent’s identity and delegated authority originate, and how they are managed.

14, Agent-to-Principal Legal Binding: the responsibility relationship that ATHENA’s authority chain would need to represent.

22, Remote Attestation: evidence that may inform identity issuance or continued validity.

23, Authorization and Privilege Lifecycle: how permissions are managed once authority has been established.

25, Age-Aware Identity and Delegated Authority: a concrete use case for constrained, privacy-preserving delegation.

Discussion

The proposal is not to require every AI agent to have a SIM or eSIM. It is to start with the architectural strengths of telco-grade identity: an accountable trust root, controlled issuance, delegated authority, lifecycle management, federation and operational enforcement. ATHENA would use that starting point to ask what a trustworthy agent identity architecture needs at scale, including when agents operate outside telecommunications networks.