Universal Participant Identity for the AI-Enabled Economy: Why Every Participant in an Autonomous Economy Needs Identity That Carries More Than Authentication

The AI-enabled economy requires identity infrastructure that serves not only software agents but every class of autonomous participant: robots, vehicles, sensors, language models, governments, corporations, and the humans on whose behalf they all operate. Current identity standards and commercial products address authentication within platform boundaries but leave unanswered the questions that determine whether an interaction between strangers can proceed: what a participant is authorized to do, who certified it, what jurisdiction governs it, and what conditions apply to its outputs. This paper derives fifteen first-principles requirements that identity must satisfy for autonomous participants operating across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries at machine speed without human supervision. Nine address what a governance system needs to verify a stranger's participant. Six address what two governance systems need from each other to form a mutually binding contract autonomously. A systematic evaluation of the current landscape, spanning established standards, emerging IETF specifications, platform-native implementations, and commercial products, finds partial coverage of the first nine requirements and total absence of the contract negotiation six. The paper argues that certificate-based identity with governance-enabling attributes, verified by independent trusted third parties including specialized certification bodies, is the architectural direction the economy requires.