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Common Agent Specification

The Common Agent Specification is an open, vendor-neutral format for defining AI agents, tools, and schedules as declarative YAML manifests. An agent's capabilities, constraints, and policies are all expressed in a single human-readable file — there is no code to understand, no runtime to inspect, no deployment configuration to trace.

Who is this for?​

  • Runtime implementers — build a compliant execution engine that loads and runs Common Agent manifests.
  • Platform operators — configure, audit, and govern agents deployed in your environment.
  • Agent authors — write agents and tools using the portable manifest format, knowing they will run on any compliant runtime.

How to read this specification​

Start with Why? for the design rationale, then Concepts for the mental model. The resource reference pages (Agent, Tool, Bundle, Schedule) are the normative field-level spec. The Task Lifecycle and Reference sections cover runtime behaviour and expression syntax.

Versioning​

The current version of the specification uses the kind prefix commonagents.info/v1. Every resource manifest must declare its kind:

kind: "commonagents.info/v1/agent"

Licence​

The Common Agent Specification is published by Buoyant Systems and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

You are free to implement, fork, redistribute, and build commercial products on top of this specification. You must give appropriate credit to Buoyant Systems and link to the licence.