Vercel is acquiring Better Auth, the company behind the open source TypeScript authentication library, which has 4.7M+ weekly npm downloads and more than 850 contributors. Founder Bereket Engida and the core team are joining Vercel to continue their work on Better Auth and agent identity.
Last year, we published our approach behind Next.js, AI SDK, and Nuxt: software that's open by default, loosely coupled, and portable to any platform.
Better Auth applies it to authentication: framework-agnostic, runs anywhere, and gives developers auth they own.
When an agent acts on your behalf, it runs under your identity and access, so every service it touches sees you, not the agent. There's no clean way to limit what any one agent or subagent can do, or to shut down just one without cutting off the rest.
The Better Auth team has been building Agent Auth so that each agent can carry its own identity and its own scoped, revocable authority, with you as the single point of control. Agent identity is foundational to agentic infrastructure.
The Better Auth team will continue that work at Vercel, bringing agent identity to Vercel Connect and eve. The library remains free and open source under MIT, retains its name, and the team continues to lead development with the same open contribution model, community governance, and framework support across the ecosystem.
Read the announcement on the Better Auth blog. Explore the Better Auth documentation and the Agent Auth Protocol, or contribute to the project on GitHub.