The Argument
The agentic economy is being built on a structural assumption that will not hold: that verifying a human's identity at the point of onboarding is sufficient to sustain trust across the full duration of a delegated relationship. Know Your Customer (KYC) verifies who the human was at onboarding. Know Your Agent (KYA) verifies that the agent is legitimate and traceable. But neither addresses the temporal gap between delegation and execution - the space in which the human's circumstances, intentions, and authorisations continue to change while the agent's instructions remain static. The AXD Institute introduces Know Your Human (KYH) as the design framework for this missing layer: the continuous validation of a human principal's current authorisation behind an autonomous agent.
The Evidence
The essay maps every delegated transaction against the Three Moments of Human Authority: the moment of intent (KYC), the moment of delegation (KYA), and the moment of execution (KYH). It demonstrates that the current trust stack - World's AgentKit, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol - addresses the first two moments but leaves the third entirely unaddressed. The cryptographic proofs these systems provide are historical, not continuous. They answer who was this human when the mandate was granted, not who is this human now.
The essay introduces authority drift - the progressive divergence between a human principal's current intentions and the standing mandate their agent continues to execute. Authority drift is not fraud or technical failure; it is an inherent structural property of any delegated system. A customer who loses their job six weeks after configuring an agent's standing instructions illustrates the problem: the agent continues to execute, the transactions pass compliance checks, and no institution in the chain can see that the mandate no longer reflects the human's current circumstances. For institutions operating under Consumer Duty obligations, this creates regulatory exposure that cannot be measured or remediated without a KYH-capable design layer.
The Implication
KYH-compliant system design rests on five foundational principles: continuous relevance (mandates require ongoing validation against the human's current context), proportional authority (agent scope contracts as time passes from delegation), principal legibility (the human can always see what their agent is authorised to do), contextual sensitivity (the system detects material changes in the principal's circumstances), and graceful suspension (when current authorisation cannot be confirmed, the agent stops and waits rather than continuing).
Strategically, the institution that builds the KYH capability holds the most valuable position in the agentic economy: the continuous human validation layer that sits between delegation and execution. This is not merely a compliance requirement - it is the deepest, most continuous customer relationship available in the emerging era. The window in which institutions can shape the design standards for KYH, before those standards are set by platforms or regulators, is open now and will not remain open indefinitely. KYC told institutions who their customers were. KYH tells institutions who their customers are.