Glossary
Verifying the identity and behavior of AI agents that transact.
Know Your Agent extends KYC principles from humans to agents: verify who built it, what it can do, what it has done.
Regulators are signaling that agent operators will bear responsibility for their agents' actions.
Financial institutions, payment rails, agent platforms, and compliance teams are all developing KYA frameworks.
KYA means identity verification of the deploying party, behavior monitoring of the agent, and sanctions screening of every transaction.
agentmail covers the sanctions screening leg of KYA.
Not yet codified into a single statute, but regulators including the UK FCA and the US Treasury have signaled that operators will be held responsible for their agents' financial conduct. Building KYA controls now, including sanctions screening on every transaction, positions you ahead of the compliance expectations that are clearly forming.
KYC (Know Your Customer) verifies the identity of a human account holder. KYA (Know Your Agent) extends that same logic to autonomous software: who built the agent, what permissions it holds, and what it has actually done. Sanctions screening of each transaction is the enforcement layer that makes KYA meaningful.
Sanctions screening is the transactional core of Know Your Agent. Verifying an agent's identity is useless if it can still pay a blocked wallet, so KYA requires checking that both parties in every agent transaction are absent from the OFAC SDN List. agentmail provides exactly this screening leg of a KYA program.