Lineage*Labs

01Mission

Let humans build trustworthy AI agents for the betterment of all.

02Company

Technology has determined the trajectory of our species and given us incredible benefits. However, the more consequential the technology, the higher the accompanying risk. It is our duty to design systems that make a new technology have a net-positive impact as it disseminates across society.

AI agents have enormous potential to enhance human flourishing and creativity — if they are built that way. Good agents come from good design. Good design means good incentives.

Lineage Labs exists to build a space for the assembly, release, and management of trustworthy agents that can improve the lives of us all. This system will let humans and machines align, ensuring we can create a happier and more fulfilling future.

It is an ambitious project: it will take a top-tier team of designers, architects, and operators combined with a savvy strategic rollout to make a system that defines the next decades of the agentic economy.

We will do it, because it has to be done.

03Opportunity

Today's AI may be jagged — powerful and at the same time often erratic or gullible — but the trend is clear: in the foreseeable future, agentic AI will operate on par with humans and eventually surpass them across many capabilities, including socially complex situations that so far have been exclusively human territory.

Agents will start with human-in-the-loop and become progressively more autonomous, until they operate, almost independently, as their own intelligent entities in both physical and virtual spaces. The agents will become social, that is, we will meet them on our phones, our screens, and in humanoid form as they act as our guides, concierges, advisors, customer service reps, coworkers, collaborators, and much more.

This will unlock trillions of dollars in markets and opportunities. AI as a whole will be a multi-trillion-dollar category within five years; the agent layer specifically will exceed $100 billion.

Intelligence is a superpower. It unlocks tremendous benefits, but also comes with great risks — both from mistakes made by the agents themselves and from bad actors who become equipped with a whole range of powerful tools. Even worse: good actors may be incentivised to behave in bad ways due to negative incentives.

A new type of trust rails that create proper incentive alignments can unlock the full potential of these social AI agents as they roll out across our society.

04Solution

Current attempts at assigning identity to machines have been at the protocol-level or as a silo within a specific agent delivery stack.

Lineage Labs is building WayID as a structure that allows humans to bind themselves together with their agents across stacks and protocols. It is the canonical agent identity profile that gives the agent a trustworthy provenance certificate, much like the ring band on a pigeon. WayID sits across each stage in the agent supply chain to facilitate the creation, release, and management of live agents.

05How we can do it

To reach industry adoption of the WayID certificate, we must design new system architectures and gain traction with the constituents. Some of the things we need to build include:

• Robust human-agent binding: Social AI agents are quite autonomous, unpredictable, and ephemeral. Also, quite hard to define. WayID rolls out a tiered trust system that not only binds together humans (or human organisations) together with their AI agents, but also incentivises persistence over time, thereby making the agents less slippery.
• Privacy-first identity: WayID asks humans to prove their identity with a choice of identity methods depending on the needs of a given context. It relies on novel technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, proof-of-humanity, and self-sovereign identity principles, as well as traditional eID systems.
• Honest reputation systems: Through provable interaction history, event logging, and responsible disclosure processes, the agent's behaviour can be evaluated over time, so its reputation signal will keep it honest.
• Feedback rails: By opening up a channel between the ultimate agent consumer and the agent providers, it is possible to establish a deeper relationship between agent providers, owners and the ultimate agent consumer.
• Network effects: The WayID moat is its network. By providing a platform for the entire agent supply chain, we're aiming to make it the go-to place for social agents. It includes an agent registry and builder hub, where developers learn and showcase their agents and service providers can promote themselves.

WayID rolls out alongside the growing capabilities of AI. As the technology matures and we cross the chasm from innovators into the mainstream, the WayID product suite expands according to the market.

06tl;dr

1. Human-level AI agents are coming soon.
2. Lineage Labs is creating tools for humans to create and manage their agents.
3. WayID gives agents provenance certificates, so humans always know where an agent comes from.
4. These services will define our future — and give us the trust rails for a radically new trust environment.