The Linux Foundation sustains critical open-source infrastructure, from the Linux Kernel to decentralized identity standards. The Applied Social Media Lab participated in several discussions during the Foundation’s Summit Week in Napa, California, including the Summit on Human Agency (H2H), the Linux Foundation Member Summit, and a Linux Kernel maintainers workshop, engaging the builders and maintainers of the First Person ecosystem in the shared question: how do we build trust infrastructure for a world where AI agents and humans act alongside each other in open-source ecosystems?
The Summit on Human Agency convened researchers, technologists, and policymakers to examine how identity, governance, and digital infrastructure must evolve as autonomous AI agents become fixtures of the internet. The panel “The Biggest Challenge: Restoring Our Truth Anchors” featured moderator Bettina Warburg (Advanced AI Society) and panelists Brendan A. Miller (ASML), Jim King (IndagoAI), Scott Stornetta (SureMark), and Gavin Peacock (Adobe). The discussion pressed on a core tension: the more convincing and capable AI becomes, the harder it is to know who, or what, is actually behind a digital action. Panelists argued that cryptographic and trust infrastructure is the necessary chain that links what a system does to who authorized it, and traces that authorization back to its human source.
Throughout the week, the ASML team demonstrated the ASML Wallet, a prototype built on the Open Wallet Foundation’s Bifold stack. The ASML Wallet enables peer-to-peer issuance of Verifiable Relationship Credentials (VRCs), optionally anchored with device attestations, and witness attestations from a “trust community” or organization.
The Summit also featured H2H Connect, a commercial app that let participants exchange privacy-preserving relationship credentials during the event, putting the VRC specification—drafted by Brendan Miller and Alberto Leon with input from the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group—into live practice at scale.
Later in the week, the Linux Foundation Member Summit hosted “Decentralized Trust for the Internet of Agents,” with Drummond Reed (Trust Over IP/Ayra Association), Brendan Miller (ASML), Alberto Leon (ASML), and Tricia Wang (Advanced AI Society). The session explored how open standards and decentralized identity technologies can support a unified trust infrastructure spanning both humans and AI agents.
A Linux Kernel maintainers workshop closed out the week by examining how Verifiable Relationship Credentials, and Verifiable Trust Communities built on top of them, could address long-standing trust challenges in open-source development. Members of the First Person Project presented current VRC tooling developed for LF Decentralized Trust, demonstrating how verifiable credentials could strengthen maintainer verification and open-source supply-chain security. Maintainers engaged with this approach, recognizing both the depth of the problem and the promise of the decentralized approach.
For ASML’s Digital Identity team, the week was an opportunity to be immersed in broader efforts to build interoperable trust infrastructure for the next generation of the internet.
