Agent Accord Specification

Contact: [email protected]
Published: 2026-05-20

1. Problem statement

Existing machine-web primitives answer adjacent questions but leave a bilateral gap. robots.txt says what an origin prefers. Web Bot Auth says who is asking. Privacy Pass can help with unlinkable authorization. None of these alone records what both sides accepted for a specific class of interaction.

2. Three-artifact model

• /.well-known/agent-accord.json publishes an origin's accord template.
• agent-accord-receipt represents a concrete signed acceptance event.
• An accord transparency log anchors receipt hashes for later audit.

3. Scope in v1-draft

This draft standardizes the template surface and publishes a receipt schema for review. It does not define a final negotiation protocol, receipt transport, or production transparency infrastructure.

4. Relationship to adjacent standards

• robots.txt: unilateral crawl preferences, not bilateral acceptance.
• HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421): likely receipt-signing primitive.
• Web Bot Auth / draft-meunier-webbotauth-registry: crawler identity layer.
• Privacy Pass (RFC 9576/9578): unlinkable authorization primitive, orthogonal to accord's auditable bilateral record.

5. Legal and jurisdictional posture

v1-draft is a technical and doctrinal specification draft. It should not be read as a complete legal contract or as binding jurisdiction-specific language. Implementers may layer jurisdictional terms above it later.

6. Reference surfaces

• /.well-known/agent-accord.json
• /schemas/agent-accord/v1-draft/schema.json
• /schemas/agent-accord-receipt/v1-draft/schema.json
• Draft status and open questions