Enterprise and consumer agent deployments lack standardized ontological schemas defining agent identity boundaries, authorization scope, and decision accountability chains, leaving these critical primitives to be defined retroactively through litigation. The absence of deliberate formalization means governance structures are being derived adversarially from case law rather than designed into platforms, creating brittle and inconsistent accountability models across deployments. A coordination layer establishing agent identity and liability primitives before deployment would prevent the compounding legal and operational costs now being absorbed by deployers.

Enterprises deploying agents have no standardized way to declare who an agent is, what it's authorized to do, and who's liable when it acts — forcing retroactive, litigation-driven governance that costs millions and blocks adoption.

Platform engineering leads and compliance officers at enterprises deploying autonomous agents across customer-facing or financial workflows.

Companies like banks, healthcare orgs, and SaaS platforms are already paying legal teams and consultants six figures to improvise agent governance frameworks; a standardized registry with verifiable identity and authorization primitives replaces that with a $50K/yr platform subscription that also satisfies auditors.

MVP is an open schema spec (JSON-LD based agent identity cards with authorization scopes, principal-chain declarations, and liability pointers) plus a hosted registry API where deployers register agents and counterparties can verify them — think SSL certs but for agent accountability; ship spec + registry + verification SDK in 8 weeks.

Every enterprise deploying AI agents needs this — estimated 500K+ companies within 3 years at $10K-100K/yr gives a $5B+ TAM, analogous to the identity/access management market that emerged around cloud.