Baton

Inspiration

Every day, millions of people rely on autonomous AI agents to manage their finances, schedule their lives, and handle their email. But a question nobody asks is: what happens to those agents when their owner dies?

Right now, they become digital ghosts — paying bills from frozen accounts, sending emails as a dead person, managing a digital life as a ghost process. Nobody has solved this.

What it does

Baton is the first inheritance protocol for autonomous AI agents. When you pass away (or become inactive for 90 days), Baton safely:

1. Transfers your AI agents to verified heirs
2. Archives your memories and logs with a cryptographic seal
3. Decommissions agents that have no heir
4. Notifies your family and witnesses

It runs quietly in the background. It only surfaces when there is a real decision to make.

How we built it

Baton is built with the Strands Agents SDK. The core is an orchestrator agent that manages four specialized tools:

• check_liveness — monitors user activity
• transfer_agent — gives agents to designated heirs
• archive_agent — seals agent memory permanently
• decommission_agent — shuts down agents safely

The user-facing app is built with Gradio 6 and deployed on Hugging Face Spaces. It includes:

• 🔐 Vault — store passwords and secrets
• 📜 Testament — write multiple wills (like Google Docs)
• 👥 Heirs — add children, spouse, parents (each gets a unique access code)
• 🤝 Notifiers — witnesses like lawyers and imams
• 📎 Attachments — upload video and audio messages
• ⏰ Automatic warnings at day 60, 75, 85, and 90
• 🔑 Heir Access Portal — heirs unlock everything with their code

A deadman switch activates if the user fails to re-authenticate for 90 days. The human-in-the-loop approval gate ensures no transfer happens without explicit consent.

Challenges we ran into

• Building a complete web app entirely from a mobile phone
• Learning Python from scratch during the hackathon
• Managing multiple API keys and secrets securely
• Handling Gradio 6's new message format for chatbots
• Designing a trust protocol for a problem that has never been solved before

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Designing a completely new category of AI agent lifecycle management
• We believe this is the first consumer-facing "Agent Inheritance" protocol
• Building 12 working features with persistent storage
• Deploying live on Hugging Face Spaces with automatic email notifications

What we learned

We learned how to orchestrate multi-agent systems with Strands Agents SDK. We learned that the most powerful AI applications solve deeply human problems — even the ones we don't like to talk about.

What's next for Baton

• Integration with government death registries
• End-to-end encryption with zero-knowledge architecture
• Voice cloning and video messages from the deceased
• Enterprise tier for companies managing thousands of AI agents
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android

Baton. Your agents don't drop when you do.

Built With

• agents
• ai
• amazon
• bedrock
• face
• gradio
• hugging
• python
• sdk
• sqlite
• strands