Agent Standards Ecosystem

The Agent standards ecosystem splits agent products into portable contracts. Each standard owns one layer of meaning and links to the others through stable refs instead of swallowing their responsibilities.

Where Agent Tool fits

Agent Tool owns portable tool facts: declarations, surfaces, capability refs, input/output contracts, execution profiles, permission profiles, invocations, progress, results, errors, and audit refs.

Tool explains what capability was exposed, how it was selected, what call was made, how it progressed, what result came back, and how native protocol ids relate to runtime, UI, evidence, policy, artifact, knowledge, and skills.

Current standards

Standard	Role	Site	LLM context	Repository
Agent Knowledge	Source-grounded knowledge packs for agents.	site	llms-full	repo
Agent UI	Interaction surfaces for agent products.	site	llms-full	repo
Agent Runtime	Execution facts, controls, tasks, tools, and recovery.	site	llms-full	repo
Agent Evidence	Evidence, provenance, verification, review, replay, and export.	site	llms-full	repo
Agent Policy	Risk, permission, approval, retention, waiver, access, and policy decision facts.	site	llms-full	repo
Agent Artifact	Durable deliverables, versions, parts, previews, exports, source links, and handoff packages.	site	llms-full	repo
Agent Tool	Tool declarations, surfaces, invocations, progress, results, permissions, and audit refs.	site	llms-full	repo
Agent Context	Context surfaces, items, source refs, selection, budgets, assembly, injection, compaction, and missing-context facts.	site	llms-full	repo

Boundary rule

Agent Knowledge -> what durable source-grounded context an agent can use
Agent Runtime   -> how agent work is accepted, executed, controlled, and resumed
Agent UI        -> how agent work is projected into user-visible surfaces
Agent Evidence  -> why an agent outcome can be trusted, reviewed, replayed, and exported
Agent Policy    -> whether an agent action may proceed and under which constraints
Agent Artifact  -> what durable deliverable the agent produced and how it changes
Agent Tool      -> what capability was exposed, invoked, progressed, and returned
Agent Context   -> what context was available, selected, assembled, compacted, missing, and injected

No standard should become the whole stack. A compatible implementation should preserve native ids and link across standards with refs.

Future standard candidates

Candidate	Why it may become a standard
Agent Evaluation	Acceptance scenarios, rubrics, eval runs, quality gates, and evidence-backed benchmark records.
Agent Workflow	Portable multi-step work plans, scene launches, background jobs, and handoff states.
Agent Model Routing	Task profiles, model candidates, routing decisions, fallback, quota, and cost records.
Agent Channel	Remote runtime, A2A peers, webhooks, deep links, browser sessions, and desktop bridges.

These candidates should remain design notes until they can be specified without relying on one product implementation.