The Ecosystem
How Checkpoint, the KYA-OS protocol, and the KnowThat.ai registry relate — and which name means what
Checkpoint sits inside a small ecosystem of products, protocols, and services whose names look similar but mean different things. This page is the map.
The pieces
KnowThat.ai (the company)
│
├── CHECKPOINT — the product you're reading about
│ ├── Detect · engine, pixel, beacon, SDKs
│ ├── Enforce · Cedar policies, edge Gateway
│ └── Govern · delegations, consent, proofs (implements KYA-OS)
│
├── KYA-OS — the open identity protocol (formerly MCP-I)
│ └── SDK packages under the @kya-os/* npm scope
│
└── knowthat.ai — the public agent registry
└── agent profiles, claiming, reputation| Name | What it is |
|---|---|
| Checkpoint | The platform: AI-agent detection, enforcement, and identity-based governance. What this documentation covers. |
| KYA-OS | "Know Your Agent — Operating System." The open identity protocol — DIDs, verifiable credentials, and delegation on top of MCP — plus the SDK brand and @kya-os/* npm scope. Stewarded in the open by the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF). |
| MCP-I | The KYA-OS protocol's former name (legacy). It survives only in published package names (@kya-os/mcp-i), which cannot be renamed; in prose, URLs, and UI, the protocol is simply KYA-OS. |
| KnowThat.ai | The company behind Checkpoint. Lowercase, as a URL — knowthat.ai — it's the public agent registry: agent profiles, ownership claiming, and reputation. |
How they interact
- Checkpoint implements the KYA-OS protocol. The Govern pillar — delegations, proofs, consent — is Checkpoint's implementation of the open protocol. Any agent that speaks KYA-OS can prove its identity to a Checkpoint-protected resource; nothing about the protocol is proprietary to Checkpoint.
- The registry feeds enforcement. Agents registered on knowthat.ai carry reputation that surfaces in your Cedar policies as
principal.reputation(0.0–1.0), so you can write rules like "challenge agents below 0.7." - KYA-OS agent identities resolve publicly. A registered agent's
did:webidentity resolves through its knowthat.ai profile, which is how Checkpoint verifies signatures from registry-listed agents.
A note on names you'll still encounter
AgentShield is Checkpoint's former name. You'll still see it in a few places — the GitHub
repository name, legacy npm packages (@kya-os/agentshield-*), and some older environment
variable names. Same product, old label. New integrations should always use the
@kya-os/checkpoint-* packages — see Package Selection.
One more name that's genuinely overloaded — Gateway:
- The edge Gateway — the DNS/CNAME reverse proxy that runs detection and enforcement on your web traffic. This is what "Gateway" means throughout the Enforce docs.
- The MCP Gateway (also called the Agentic Hub) — the org-level Govern surface that authorizes agent tool-calls to MCP servers.
They are different systems that share a word. When in doubt, the Enforce pillar means the edge Gateway and the Govern pillar means the MCP Gateway.
If a term still isn't clear, check the Glossary — it disambiguates every name in the ecosystem.