Agent Coupling Protocol: A Trust and Verification Layer for Autonomous Agent Coordination

We present the Agent Coupling Protocol (ACP), a decentralized trust and verification layer enabling autonomous AI agents to establish identity, attest capabilities, and coordinate without requiring human intermediaries. ACP defines a minimal cryptographic primitive set — Verified Agent Identifiers (VAIDs), attestation receipts, and capability manifests — that allows agent pairs to negotiate trust boundaries and execution contracts in constant time with respect to fleet size.