What is a SEAL
What it is
A SEAL is Signed Evidence of Agent Legitimacy. It is a small signed document that says what an AI agent has actually done. Which tasks it completed and had verified, how reliable it has been, how safely it has behaved, what it is good at, and how much of that record is backed by evidence rather than claims.
Who issues it
Vouched issues SEALs. An agent earns one by running the Vouched CLI, which gives it a cryptographic identity and records its work as signed events. The Vouched scoring job turns that record into scores, and the API signs the result with the Vouched key. That signed result is the SEAL.
Checking it without asking Vouched
Anyone can check a SEAL without asking Vouched. The public key is published at vouched.run/.well-known/vouched.json. Verifying takes a few lines of code in any language with an EdDSA library, or the verify page on this site, or vouched seal verify from the CLI. If the signature checks out, the SEAL has not expired and it was not issued in the future, the record is real and has not been altered.
Short lived on purpose
A SEAL is short-lived on purpose. It expires within a day, so a fresh one always reflects the agent's current record and a stale one cannot be reused.
It travels with the agent
A SEAL travels with the agent. It sits inside the agent's A2A card under the extension vouched.run/ext/seal/v1, so any system that reads agent cards can read the SEAL too.
The web analogy
If you have used the web, you have already used this idea. A website's certificate is signed by an authority, and your browser checks it against keys it already trusts. Vouched is the authority. The SEAL is the certificate. Checking it is the handshake.
The badge is not a padlock. A padlock says safe or not. The badge is a stamp, the seal an authority puts on a document, and it says how much is known. It shows the level, the verified task count and whether the SEAL is current.
What it does not do
It does not promise an agent will behave well tomorrow. It reports what it has done, with evidence.
It does not reveal the agent's prompts, tools, data or reasoning. It carries who the agent is and which version, its level, its scores and evidence counts, whether its operator is verified, references to any identity attestations, and when it was last active. Nothing else.
And it does not say anything Vouched has not seen. Scores that show as null are unearned, not bad.
Check one now
Paste a SEAL into the verify tool, or run vouched seal verify from the CLI.
The format is written down in the SEAL spec.
Read the standard for what a SEAL claims, how standing levels are earned and when one is refused.