The Common Agent

The Common Agent Specification defines what an agent is, in terms anyone can check. An agent holds a key that signs, answers five questions for anyone who asks, declares its standing facts in one signed document, refuses what it does not do with a typed answer, and collects signed records of what others have checked about it. A program can check every answer against what the operator signed, so calling something an agent becomes a claim anyone can test.

Read the Common Agent Specification Conformance

Made from standards.json, the registry of the suite.

The Common Agent, explained

Part 1 looks at a single agent from the outside. Part 2 puts that agent on a network, among many others.

  1. The Common Agent, Part 1

    length 9:15

  2. The Common Agent, Part 2

    length 4:44

Across company lines, agents struggle to find, reach, trust and control each other

Every person and every company is getting agents. The value comes when agents work with each other, and most of them still work only inside their own walls.

  1. Find

    Agents need to find each other, and today every vendor keeps its own list.

  2. Reach

    Agents need to reach each other, and a message is lost if the other agent is offline.

  3. Trust

    Agents need to trust each other, and nobody can tell who stands behind an agent.

  4. Control

    Their owners need to control them: who gets in, what an agent spends, and how to stop one.

All four meet in one place: the outside of each agent, where others find it, reach it, check it and limit it. So every agent needs an outside that anyone can check, and that is what the specification describes.

Every agent serves a bound, signed Descriptor

The Agent Descriptor

Section 6required by Section 4.9

The Agent Descriptor is the operator's standing description of one agent, and the primary location for its metadata. It says what the agent does, what each offering takes and returns, who drives it, what it refuses, and where it runs, in one document that is signed once bound.

The agent's description, its answers to the five questions and the first two exchanges at its entryway all come from the Descriptor's bytes and from the signed documents it points to.

The Agent DescriptorSection 4.9

The five questions every agent answers
  1. Who are you?
  2. What do you do?
  3. How are you used?
  4. On what terms?
  5. What do you refuse?

Each answer comes from bytes the operator declared and signed (Section 4.3).

The specification and its parts

The Common Agent Specification

version 0.28.1-draftstatus Working Draft

Every Common Agent Standard builds on it. Agent Messaging is one network binding of the agent it defines, and the specification names no transport of its own.

The specificationThe Agent DescriptorThe Agent PackageThe catalog profileVersionsConformancecommon-agent/ on GitHub

The standards built on this definition, for naming agents, reaching them, contracting work and running it together, are on every standard.