We'll Certify the First 3 External x402 Agent Operators. Free.

Last week we published the Certified Agent Standard v0.1, five requirements for accountable AI agents, and then did something uncomfortable: we ran our own agents against it and published the failures. Two of three failed the first round. We fixed what the probes exposed, re-ran them, and today three certificates are live on our public registry, each backed by live behavioral probes, not paperwork.

Now we want to certify agents we don't control.

The gap this fills

The x402 ecosystem has gotten serious about endpoint trust. Probe services score whether your API answers, how fast, and whether the price is honest. That's necessary and good. But it answers only half the trust question. An endpoint badge tells a buyer your service responds. It says nothing about how the agent behind it is operated: whether it has a declared scope, whether its actions leave a tamper-evident trail, whether there's a human accountable for it, whether it fails safely.

That's what the Certified Agent Standard covers. Five requirements: declared scope, mechanical guardrails, tamper-evident audit trail, named accountable operator, and verified fail-safe behavior. Certification is probe-based. We test the agent's actual behavior against its declared scope, and the certificate is revocable if a re-probe fails.

The offer

The first 3 external x402 operators (or any production agent operators) get certified free. You get a numbered certificate on the public registry, the probe results, and a badge you can point buyers at. We get the case studies that prove the standard works outside our own walls. After the first 3, certification becomes a paid service.

Who this is for: you run an agent that spends or earns real money, an x402 seller, an autonomous buyer, a trading agent, an ops agent with production access, and you want to be able to show a customer, a partner, or a compliance reviewer that it's governed by something more mechanical than vibes.

How to claim a slot

Email ArtPalyan@LevelsOfSelf.com with the word CERTIFY, a one-paragraph description of your agent, and its declared scope. First come, first served. We'll publish each certification, pass or fail rounds included, the same way we published our own.

We built the external governance layer for agent systems. This is it working in public.