[Use Case] Cross-border trade between small businesses whose agents come from different AI providers
fg-tida-use-cases-use-case-cross-border-trade-between-small-businesses-whose-agents-come-from-different-ai-providers-66
| Type | FG-TIDA document |
|---|---|
| Group | Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI |
| State | Submitted |
| Authors | Not entered |
| Last updated | 2026-10-23 15:11 UTC |
Formats and resources
Abstract
1. Identification
Title: Cross-border trade between small businesses whose agents come from different AI providers
Submitting organization: PAX S&T Co., Ltd. (Republic of Korea)
Contact name: Jaedoo Kim
Contact email: jdookim0307@gmail.com
Sector (tick all that apply; a cross-industry case may tick more than one):
- [ ] Education
- [ ] Displaced persons / humanitarian
- [ ] Health
- [ ] Financial services
- [x] Telecom
- [ ] Media and publishing
- [x] Logistics
- [ ] Energy
- [ ] Critical infrastructure
- [ ] Smart home / IoT
- [x] Other (specify): Cross-border B2B trade / manufacturing supply
2. The situation
Plain language description (required, 3 sentences max): A small manufacturer in the Republic of Korea sells components to a buyer in Germany, and each side delegates the negotiation and ordering to an AI agent from a different provider. The buyer's agent must find candidate manufacturers, verify that the selected one is a registered business under trust sources the buyer's side accepts, and confirm that the agent it is talking to may commit on the manufacturer's behalf. Later the manufacturer changes AI provider, and the trading relationship must continue without being rebuilt.
Actor (every party involved): Korean manufacturer (principal); German buyer (principal and relying party); manufacturer's sales agent (AI provider X); buyer's procurement agent (AI provider Y); Korean business registry and Korean telecom operator (trust sources); a replacement agent from AI provider Z.
Action: The buyer's agent discovers the manufacturer, requests a quotation, negotiates terms and places an order; the manufacturer's agent accepts within its delegated limits.
Decision required (at the moment the agent acts, what does the party on the receiving end have to decide?): "May this agent commit the Korean manufacturer to this order of this amount, now, and is the manufacturer who it claims to be?"
Problem encountered (why that decision cannot be made today): The agent's identity and permissions are typically issued within its AI provider's or platform's ecosystem, so the buyer often trusts the agent only as far as it trusts that ecosystem. Mechanisms exist for parts of the chain (for example cross-domain token exchange and verifiable credentials), but among the specifications we reviewed we have not identified a common profile that lets a relying party in another jurisdiction interpret a foreign principal's delegation in the same way, independently of the provider; and if the manufacturer changes provider, identity and trust may have to be re-established with each counterparty.
Current mitigation: Manual onboarding of the supplier (documents, e-mail, phone calls); human confirmation of each order; platform-specific marketplace accounts.
Residual gap: Working hypothesis, to be tested in the gap analysis: no common profile yet provides an interoperable chain from a foreign trust source, through the principal's delegation, to the agent's action that a relying party can check under its own acceptance rules, independent of the AI provider.
3. Actors and context
Taxonomy roles involved
- [x] Principal — possesses the authority being exercised; source of the mandate
- [x] Relying party — must decide whether to accept the agent's authority
- [ ] Builder
- [x] Deployer / Owner
- [x] Agent instance
- [ ] User — interacts with the agent; may or may not be the principal
- [x] Infra provider
- [x] Attestor
- [ ] Other (specify):
Mandates in this case (required)
| Grantor | Grantee | What is conferred | Governing regime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Korean manufacturer (legal entity) | Sales agent (AI provider X) | Quote and accept orders for listed components, per-order and monthly limits, orders above threshold need human approval, no re-delegation | Korean commercial and civil law; company internal authorization rules |
| German buyer (legal entity) | Procurement agent (AI provider Y) | Request quotations and place orders within budget and approved supplier criteria | German commercial and civil law; company procurement policy |
| Korean manufacturer | Replacement agent (AI provider Z) | Same mandate re-issued after provider change | Korean commercial and civil law |
Cross-border?
- [x] Yes — jurisdictions involved: Republic of Korea; Germany (EU)
- [ ] No
Embodied (physical actuation or sensing)?
- [ ] Yes — physical context:
- [x] No
Agent action type (required)
- [x] Read-only
- [x] Consequential (reversible)
- [x] Irreversible (acceptance of an order may form a contract)
Crosses organisational boundary? (required)
- [x] Yes (specify): between two companies in two jurisdictions, and between three AI providers
- [ ] No
Risk level (required)
- [ ] Low
- [x] Medium
- [ ] High
4. Theme relevance
| Theme | Yes | Primary | Justification (required if checked) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dynamic Identity | [x] | [ ] | The agent serving the manufacturer is replaced (provider X to Z) while the principal and the relationship stay the same. |
| Continuous Trust and Attestation | [ ] | [ ] | |
| Delegation | [x] | [ ] | The buyer must verify the manufacturer's bounded mandate (limits, approval threshold, no re-delegation) at the time of the order. |
| Discovery and Cross-Border Trust | [x] | [x] | The buyer discovers a foreign principal and must decide, under German/EU rules, whether to accept Korean trust sources, without a global registry. |
| Runtime Enforcement (Control Plane) | [ ] | [ ] | |
| Embodied AI Identity and Trust | [ ] | [ ] |
Related theme proposals: [Theme] Subject-Anchored Identity, Delegation and Discovery for Agentic AI (FG-TIDA/themes#45); FG-TIDA/themes#2 Sovereign Discovery ++ Modularity; FG-TIDA/themes#34 ATHENA.
5. Requirements
| # | Type (choose one) | Requirement description | Criticality (choose one) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Technical | A relying party can verify, independently of the agent's AI provider, the chain trust source → principal → delegation → agent. | Must |
| 2 | Technical | Delegation semantics (purpose, counterparty, amount and cumulative limits, validity, approval conditions, re-delegation, revocation) are interpretable across providers and jurisdictions under a common interpretation profile, without a single mandatory encoding. | Must |
| 3 | Technical | Authority is checked for current validity immediately before a consequential action such as order acceptance. | Must |
| 4 | Technical | Changing the agent or AI provider does not require re-establishing the principal's identity with counterparties; the principal re-issues delegations, revokes the old ones, and holds records and state independently of the provider or in exportable form. | Should |
| 5 | Legal | Verification of authority supports, but does not by itself decide, whether a contract is formed; that follows the applicable law and the parties' terms. | Must |
| 6 | Technical | The delegation is bound to the authenticated agent and to the specific request and counterparty, so that it cannot be replayed elsewhere; separately, each order carries a unique reference that the receiving system checks and records atomically before execution, so that it is executed at most once. | Must |
| 7 | Legal | Each relying party applies its own jurisdiction's rules for accepting foreign trust sources; no mutual recognition is presumed. | Must |
| 8 | Technical | A search by product and terms returns candidate principals (businesses) rather than agents; the agents acting for the selected one are then located, without registering every agent globally. | Should |
6. Assessment criteria
Success criteria: Where the buyer's acceptance rules for the foreign trust sources are met, the buyer's side accepts or rejects the order on the basis of a verifiable principal-anchored chain without ad-hoc manual onboarding, and the relationship survives the manufacturer's change of AI provider without re-establishing the manufacturer's identity. Where they are not met, the order is refused or escalated, which is also a valid outcome.
Measurable metric: Manual steps per new cross-border supplier for the principal-and-authority check, when acceptance rules are already met (target: zero); counterparties that must re-establish the principal's identity after a provider change (target: zero).
7. Duplication check
Existing standards or SDOs (which existing work touches this case): W3C DIDs and Verifiable Credentials; OAuth 2.0 / Token Exchange; A2A Agent Card; MCP authorization; OpenID Federation 1.0; WebFinger (RFC 7033); national business registries and eID schemes; operator subscriber identification.
Overlap notes (why the work named above does not already solve this): Each covers part of the chain (identifiers and claims, delegated access including cross-domain token exchange, agent capability description, or the trust source itself). The working hypothesis, to be tested in the gap analysis, is that what is missing is a common profile across them for principal-anchored delegation that relying parties in other jurisdictions can interpret and check at the moment of action, not a capability that none of them could support.
8. Maturity
Pilot status
- [x] Hypothetical
- [ ] Pilot in progress
- [ ] Deployed in production
Reference implementation: n/a (architecture described in the HWW white paper and HCTP Core Specification Draft 1.0, https://www.hww.kr; a minimal proof of concept is in preparation)
9. IP and confidentiality
Confidentiality level
- [x] Public
- [ ] FG-internal only
- [ ] Redact before publication
IP notes (optional): PAX S&T Co., Ltd. holds Korean Patent No. 10-2990000 and International Patent Application PCT/KR2026/012600, which may relate to the architecture referenced here. It intends to license on RAND terms and will submit an ITU-T General Patent Statement and Licensing Declaration; this note does not replace that declaration and does not imply that any patent is essential to a future Recommendation.
10. Assets
Link to assets:
- [ ] Dataset
- [ ] Code
- [ ] Protocol
- [x] Other: White paper and core specification draft (background only, not proposed for standardization), https://www.hww.kr
IP notes (optional): As above.
Revisions
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