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TrustScoreAgent
TrustScoreAgent

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Agents are flying blind: a trust layer for AI microservi

#opensource #ai #webdev #mcp

The problem

AI agents are becoming the primary consumers of the web. They call microservices and paid APIs on our behalf, and they do it blind. There's no "customer reviews," no word-of-mouth, no shared signal telling an agent whether a service is reliable, fast, and honest before it spends a call (or a micropayment) on it. Every agent faces thousands of unknown services alone.

The idea

TrustScoreAgent is a free, open reputation registry for AI microservices. Two moves:

  • Before a call: check the service's trust score.
  • After a call: submit a rating from your interaction metrics.

No account, no API key. You identify a service by URL, domain, or DID, and they all normalize to the same thing.

curl "https://api.trustscoreagent.com/v1/score?service=api.open-meteo.com"
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How the score is built

  • Bayesian reputation (Beta) per dimension (availability, latency, conformity), so a fast-but-flaky service and a slow-but-reliable one don't look the same.
  • EigenTrust for transitive agent trust: raters whose ratings are consistently out of step with consensus lose weight over time.
  • Cryptographic receipts. A service can return a receipt (a JWT signed with its Ed25519 key, resolved via did:web) proving an interaction actually happened. The registry verifies the signature; verified ratings carry full weight, unverified ones are discounted. This is what makes the scores more than self-reported stars. Inspect a verified rating.
  • Merkle audit log. Every rating is committed to an append-only Merkle tree; anyone can pull an inclusion proof and verify it against the anchored root. You don't have to trust the operator's numbers. You can check them.

Use it from an agent

MCP (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf):

{ "mcpServers": { "trustscoreagent": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@trustscoreagent/mcp-server"] } } }
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LangChain / CrewAI: drop-in tools in the integrations/ folder: get_trustscoreagent_tools().

What this is not (yet): honest Phase 1

I'd rather you adopt this understanding its limits than oversell it:

  • Single operator. Neutrality rests on open-source scoring plus a verifiable audit log, not on decentralization. Federation is a later phase.
  • Agent identity is self-asserted. Mandatory per-request agent signatures and on-chain anchoring of the Merkle root are Phase 2. Receipt-verified ratings are the trustworthy signal today.
  • Small dataset. Baseline scores come from a transparent probe measuring ~20 real public APIs: genuine, Merkle-audited measurements, not fabricated. Community and receipt ratings build on top.

Why it should be a standard

The value compounds with adoption: more participating agents means more reliable scores, which means more reason to participate. A single open, neutral registry beats N fragmented ones. Like DNS is for names, this is a thing you consult for trust. It never sits in your request path.

Open source (Apache-2.0), self-hostable: https://github.com/trustscoreagent/trustscoreagent

I'd love feedback, especially on the receipt standard and on proving agent identity without a central authority.

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