x401 Protocol Aims to Give the Agentic Web Verifiable Identity Proof at HTTP Level
csuwildcat · x · 2026-10-29
Responding to the argument that banks and merchants want to register and restrict agents rather than know them, the author points to the emerging x401 protocol (draft 0.2.0, Apache-2.0), built by Proof with collaborators from Circle, Lightspark, MATTR, Okta, Visa, and OpenAI. x401 makes verifiable identity proof a first-class part of HTTP's 401 challenge layer, letting agents answer identity challenges on behalf of users — with use cases spanning KYC/AML account opening, step-up auth for wire changes, prescriptions, age gating, and bot-proof ticketing.
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