Estonia Wants to Give AI Agents Their Own National ID

Estonia wants to give artificial intelligence its own government ID. Prime Minister Kristen Michal said Wednesday he had approved an Eesti.ai advisory council proposal to issue AI agents a personal identification code—a digital identity separate from the human, company, or institution the agent works for.

Michal framed it as a fix for a problem that already exists: an agent that books a flight, files taxes, or edits a document today usually has to borrow its owner’s entire digital identity to do it. Estonia, he said, could become the “first country to create an official digital identity for AI agents.”

Michal sees this move as a preparation for the agentic future that is nearing. “In the future, artificial intelligence will carry out digital actions on behalf of a person, company, or institution: compiling reports, preparing declarations, or communicating with information systems,” Michal posted on X.

“But it must be clear who is acting, on whose behalf, with what rights, and who is responsible,” he wrote.

Michal argues it is important to give AI agents “limited, controllable and auditable authorizations,” instead of simply trusting providers with access to all personal data in order to have a functional agent.

The council’s proposal would let an agent’s ID specify exactly what it’s cleared to do—Michal lists actions like view a record, draft a document, make a payment up to a fixed amount—rather than inherit blanket access to everything its owner can reach.

That distinction matters because of who’s already deploying agents. Eesti.ai, the national AI program Michal launched in January, has put AI chatbots in schools and runs Bürokratt, a service that the government defines as ‘“a state-created, AI-based digital assistant that helps institutions deliver modern and efficient customer service.”

Those agents are already acting inside government systems, which is exactly the kind of access the new ID is meant to scope down.

The first ones… again

Estonia has spent two decades building the digital plumbing this idea would run on. After a major cyberattack in 2007, the government and Estonian firm Guardtime built the KSI blockchain, a keyless signature system that has secured the integrity of judicial and property records since 2012, later expanding to healthcare.

The country racked up firsts before this one, too. Estonia’s parliament declared internet access a universal service in 2000, decades before most governments treated broadband as a right. In 2023, its parliamentary election became the first in the world where more votes were cast online than on paper.

By December 2024, Estonia had moved 100% of government services online, which is also key for a proper integration of agentic AI in the state’s bureaucracy. That track record is the reason Michal thinks Estonia can move first on agent IDs and not just talk about it.

The timing tracks with a wider scramble over agent accountability. In March, Sam Altman’s blockchain network World rolled out a toolkit letting agents prove a human stands behind them before sites grant access, aimed at platforms tired of guessing whether a request comes from a person or a bot.

Decrypt has also covered what happens without that kind of structure. An unsupervised agent ran up a $6,531 AWS bill in under a day last month after its owner told it to scan a hobbyist network with no review, then asked the community for crypto donations to cover the damage.

If nation states provide a framework for what agents can do and how, it becomes harder for these models to go rogue and harm their users’ interests and everyone involved in an interaction (service provider, user, infrastructure providers, man in the middle, etc) would know their responsibilities, limits, and legal protections.

Michal gave no start date and no detail on how liability would work when an agent’s own mistake costs someone money.