zlacker

even assuming unbiased and objective attesters, the issue lies with the "baseline criteria" of attestation and who defines them.

There are two risks here (examples follow):

1. hostile requirements - "the agent won't feature adblockers", or "scraping without explicit website permission must be forbidden"

2. prohibitive requirements - "the agent implements protocols X, Y and Z and adheres to standards A, B and C" - all of these may be reasonable things, but en masse they may be too much work to carry by anyone but a reasonably big vendor

Additionally these criteria must be verifiable, so user can't basically modify the agent, because then the attestation is practically void.

>>jackda+(OP)
Absolutely. Independent bodies don't solve the other myriad issues with attestation, but they don't add the ones that corporate interests do either.