Vercel acquires Better Auth to give AI agents their own identity

Vercel has acquired Better Auth, the open source TypeScript authentication framework with 4.7 million weekly npm downloads. The acquisition is driven by the emerging problem of AI agent identity: today, agents typically operate under the deploying user's credentials, making it impossible to scope, audit, or revoke individual agent access. Better Auth had already begun building Agent Auth, an open protocol to give AI agents their own scoped, delegated, and revocable identities. The Better Auth team, including creator Bereket Engida, joins Vercel to integrate this work into Vercel Connect and Eve. The framework remains open source under the MIT license with the same community governance model.