Auth.md — an Open Protocol for Agent Registration From WorkOS
WorkOS announced Auth.md, an open protocol for AI agent registration. It is a Markdown file hosted at a domain that tells agents how to register users, what flows and scopes are supported, and how credentials are issued—functioning like a robots.txt for agent registration. Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted the protocol.
Background
- WorkOS is a company that provides APIs for enterprise identity features (SSO, SCIM, directory sync); they often publish open specs like this.
- Auth.md is a proposed standard: a Markdown file placed at a domain (e.g., example.com/auth.md) that tells AI agents how to programmatically register with that service — which auth flows, scopes, and credential-issuance methods are supported. Think robots.txt, but for agent onboarding.
- Markdown is the lightweight text-formatting language that John Gruber (author of this Daring Fireball post) created in 2004; his mention is self-referential.
- This matters because current web sign-up flows assume a human in a browser clicking buttons, but AI agents need machine-readable instructions to register users autonomously. Auth.md fills that gap.
- Early adopters Cloudflare, Firecrawl (a web-scraping service for AI), and Resend (an email API) signal some industry interest, but the protocol is brand new and unproven at scale.