Specification — Apache 2.0
Open Agent Governance Specification
A vocabulary for stating, in advance, what an autonomous agent is permitted to do — and for recording what was decided, whether it was allowed or refused.
Why publish it
Every platform vendor is building agent governance for their own estate. None will build it across, because governing a competitor's runtime well is a feature that helps a customer leave. An enterprise runs agents on several — so the authority and the evidence have to be expressible in terms none of those vendors own.
Deliberately unbranded
The repository is agent-governance-spec, not
rotascale-spec. A specification others are meant to implement
cannot read as one vendor's documentation — the point is that a competitor's
engine could claim conformance to it.
Apache 2.0, not CC-BY
Both permissive, but Apache carries an explicit patent grant. That matters for something people implement in products: without it, an implementer relies on nobody later asserting a patent over the mechanism they were invited to build.
What v0.2 specifies
Entity model
Agent, grant, trajectory, decision, taint, evidence batch.
Authority grammar
Nine decision gates in normative order, four trace states.
Delegation
Attenuation on five axes, ancestor debiting, revocation cascade.
Enforcement
The observe → shadow → canary → enforce ladder, and why it is one-directional.
Custody
What a signature is worth, given who held the key.
Three-state discipline
Why “we did not record this” is a third answer, not a negative one.
Clearance
A clearance is a state, not a document — six named causes that void one, and why a drifted agent is not a lapsed one.
Descriptive, and that is checked
Everything in the document is implemented and running. Nothing in it is planned.
The claim is enforced
The reference implementation's test suite reads the gate order, trace states, custody vocabulary, enforcement ladder and clearance states out of its own source, and fails the build when the specification drifts from them. Adding a tenth gate breaks the build until the document is updated in the same commit.
And what it refuses to specify
Contract language, evidence wire schema, OpenTelemetry conventions, conformance tests, cross-deployment identity — each named with the reason. Conformance tests are absent on purpose: publishing a conformance claim without them asks implementers to grade themselves.
It also says, in its own text, that it currently describes one implementation — and that a specification with one implementation is a description with ambitions. The most useful contribution anybody could make is a second one.