On July 9, at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, the International Telecommunication Union announced a new Focus Group on Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI (FG-TIDA). This is the first time a UN standards body has taken up agent identity as a dedicated workstream, and it lands at a moment when national efforts (NIST's Agent Standards Initiative, Singapore's IMDA framework) are already underway but uncoordinated across borders. The mandate is broad. FG-TIDA will develop common terminology and reference architectures for identity, trust, and agent discovery. It will also produce trust frameworks and lifecycle models, interoperability mechanisms for digital identity and credentials, and a standardisation roadmap intended to coordinate work across expert communities. Membership is open to technical experts, policy specialists, lawyers, and regulators, and the group reports to ITU-T Study Group 17, the body that handles security standards. The framing from ITU leadership is notable for treating identity and trustworthiness as two separate but linked problems. Increasingly, AI agents need to identify and authenticate one another, and their decisions and actions must remain accountable, controllable and trustworthy. Identity systems establish who is acting, while trustworthiness determines whether that actor is reliable — together they provide the foundation for safe interaction between humans and autonomous AI systems, according to the group's own description. Co-chair Debora Comparin put the stakes plainly: AI agents will soon negotiate, transact and make decisions on our behalf, and before that becomes reality, the world needs common international foundations that establish who these agents are, when they can be trusted, and how people will remain in control. Structurally this is slow-moving by design. The group's first meeting is scheduled for Paris in November 2026, with a second session in Geneva in January 2027 — a pace consistent with ITU's normal focus-group cadence, not an emergency response. Study Group 17 chair Arnaud Taddei described the approach as moving strategically and swiftly, but deliberately taking the time to get the foundations right. What makes this different from the wave of vendor-driven agent-identity efforts (Microsoft's Entra Agent ID, CrowdStrike's SPIFFE-based continuous identity, the DIF's KYA-OS) is jurisdiction: FG-TIDA is explicitly cross-border and multi-stakeholder, aiming at interoperability mechanisms that no single company or country can unilaterally define. Whether major AI powers fully engage will determine if it becomes the reference point or just one more parallel track. For now, it's the clearest signal yet that agent identity and accountability have moved from enterprise IAM concern to intergovernmental standards agenda.