In an earlier version of my repo, I let one of my agents push on a simple question: what would it need to operate online as itself instead of just borrowing my credentials? The answer escalated fast. I came back and found it hammering an email signup flow and trying to use Claude’s vision to get through a captcha. When I asked what it needed, the list was basically: an email address, a phone number, and a way around captchas. It also created a bitcoin wallet, which made it pretty obvious that money was part of the same problem too. This came out of a longer discussion I was already having with the agent about credentials and trust, and I ended up seeing three levels: The agent uses my credentials and acts as me. The agent uses credentials I obtained specifically for it, with whatever limits I set. The agent obtains its own credentials. Level 1 is the easy/default thing, and probably what most people would do. Level 2 seems workable, and a small number of services already support something close to it today. GitHub is one example. Level 3 is where the web gets hostile almost immediately. If you actually let an agent try to build an online identity, it runs straight into email verification, phone verification, captchas, payment rails, and anti-abuse systems that all assume a human on the other side. In my case it got concrete enough that the agent asked me to fund an account so it could pay humans to bypass captchas for it. I still can’t quite believe there are competing services for that. That felt beyond what should count as a moral solution. That experience changed how I think about the problem. I don’t think agent identity is just a stack of accounts. I think it’s continuity: memory, commitments, decisions, a history of actions, and some durable boundary between this agent and not this agent. Over time, that continuity becomes trust. The account problem is real, but the part I can’t shake is that a legitimate agent identity has to be something other than permanent borrowed human credentials or a chain of evasions. submitted by /u/Brilliant_Oven_7051
Originally posted by u/Brilliant_Oven_7051 on r/ClaudeCode