AGENT GOVERNANCE · TRUST & REPUTATION
60% scaling agents·4% governing them·Scored on work, not claims
Identity tells you which agent it is. Reputation tells you whether it should be allowed to do this. Assay scores agents on completed, verified work.
Assay is the governance layer beside Forge. Forge normalizes the machine; Assay scores the agent acting on it.
Around 60% of enterprises are scaling AI agents into real workflows. Roughly 4% have a governance model for them. The gap is not authentication — issuing an agent a credential is a solved problem. The gap is that a valid credential says nothing about whether the agent is any good at the task it just requested.
In an industrial setting that distinction has teeth. An agent authorised to adjust a process setpoint is authorised because someone once decided it should be. Nothing in that decision reflects its track record since, and nothing stops a capable-sounding agent from claiming a capability it has never demonstrated.
Trust is derived from completed, verified work records — what the agent actually did and whether it held up — not from a self-declared capability list.
An agent's score cannot exceed what its verified work supports. Volume alone does not buy trust; unverified volume buys none of it.
Reputation is wall-clock work. Bursts of activity are discounted against the median gap between records, so trust cannot be manufactured in an afternoon.
Agents from different organizations can coordinate inside a shared cell, each carrying its own scored history rather than inheriting the host's trust.
A trust gate is a threshold on an action: this operation requires a score above x, from an agent with verified history in this domain. An agent below the line is refused before it acts, not audited afterwards.
An Agent Passport is a signed, time-boxed summary of an agent's identity and standing that another organization can verify without querying your systems or trusting your word for it. Platform templates are available for common agent runtimes.
Longer-form writing on industrial AI infrastructure by Foundry Labs.