ITU Set to Build Trust in AI Behaviour, Identity with Global Standards Initiative

Emma Okonji with Agency Report

​​​​​​The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations agency for digital technologies, is focused on building trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI) behaviour and identity with its global standards initiative.     

The new initiative seeks to develop frameworks for trusted digital identity and to ensure that the behaviour of AI agents remains trustworthy and accountable throughout their lifecycle.

The new ITU Focus Group on Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI, announced the initiative at the just concluded AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland.

The initiative is coming at a time that AI is evolving rapidly beyond assistive tools and increasingly into autonomous agents acting on behalf of people.

While agentic AI promises major gains in productivity, it also introduces new risks ranging from autonomous agents impersonating people and organisations, to taking unauthorised actions across interconnected systems.

The ITU Focus Group seeks to address the challenges by developing frameworks that preserve meaningful human control for tasks such as executing financial transactions and operating critical infrastructure.

Speaking about the initiative, ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, said: “The future of AI depends on trust. As AI becomes more autonomous, we need to work together across industry, governments, academia and civil society to ensure the greatest possible confidence in AI systems.”

According to ITU Focus Group, the ability to establish an agent’s identity and whether its behaviour can be trusted becomes critical, especially as AI systems plan and act with growing independence

“Increasingly, AI agents need to identify and authenticate one another. Just as importantly, their decisions and actions must remain accountable, controllable and trustworthy. Identity systems establish who is acting, while trustworthiness determines whether that actor is reliable. Together they provide the foundation for safe interaction between humans and autonomous AI systems.

“The Focus Group will address the challenges of trust management for people and AI agents, the overall trustworthiness of agentic AI systems, and ways to strengthen confidence in how AI agents behave while retaining authority over their actions,” the group said.

Focus Group Co-Chair, Debora Comparin, said: “AI agents will soon negotiate, transact and make decisions on our behalf. Before that future becomes reality, we need common international foundations that establish who these agents are, when they can be trusted, and how people will remain in control. That is the challenge this Focus Group has been created to address.”

Focus Group Co-Chair, Amir Banifatemi, also said: “Agentic AI introduces a new class of digital actors that will increasingly collaborate with people and one another. Identity tells us who is acting and trustworthiness tells us how that actor can be expected to behave. Bringing these together creates the common foundation needed for interoperable, accountable, and trusted AI systems at global scale.”

According to the group, it’s open to technical experts as well as specialists in policy, law and regulation to develop: common terminology and definitions;

reference architectures for identity, trust, agent discovery, and interoperability;

trust frameworks and lifecycle (assurance) models; interoperability mechanisms for digital identity and credentials; security criteria and benchmarks for the continuous assessment of AI agents; and a standardisation roadmap to coordinate action across expert communities.

The Focus Group will report to ITU’s expert group for security standards, known as ITU-T Study Group 17.  

Also speaking about the initiative, Chair of ITU-T Study Group 17, Arnaud Taddei, said: “We are moving strategically and swiftly but deliberately taking the time to get the foundations right. We know the direction and broadly what we want to build. We are now assembling the right leadership and structure, and AI for Good is exactly where we will meet the partners that would like to join us.”

Director, ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, Seizo Onoe, said: “The consensus we build while developing ITU standards creates the clarity we need for new innovation ecosystems to grow. The focus group is an open platform designed to help everyone move forward with confidence and certainty.”

The group’s Co-Chairs will be joined by a larger leadership team that will be finalised in the coming weeks following broad consultation. The group, which is open to all interested experts, will hold its first meeting in Paris in November 2026 and its second in Geneva in January 2027.