Vercel Acquires Better Auth to Accelerate Open Source Authentication

Vercel has acquired Better Auth, an open source TypeScript authentication library with over 4.7 million weekly npm downloads. Better Auth's founder Bereket Engida and the core team will join Vercel to continue advancing Better Auth and their research into Agent Identity.

Better Auth provides an authentication solution that is framework-agnostic and can run anywhere, helping developers own their authentication outright. With this acquisition, Vercel plans to reinforce, alongside Next.js, the AI SDK, and others, a software strategy that is 'open source by default, loosely coupled, and portable across platforms.'

In particular, this acquisition focuses on Agent Auth technology, which is key to building Agentic Infrastructure. Current authentication methods make it difficult to finely restrict the permissions of agents acting on behalf of users, or to block specific agents alone. The Better Auth team has been developing protocols that allow agents to have unique identities and scoped permissions.

The Better Auth library will remain free and open source under the MIT license, retaining its existing name, community governance, and framework support model. The acquired team will continue integrating Agent Identity technology into Vercel Connect and eve.