Acknowledgements
agentrc is deliberately a thin declaration, packaging, and governance layer over proven open standards rather than a reinvention of them. It owes a direct debt to the projects below — listed, where possible, by their source repositories. agentrc declares and governs these; it does not replace any of them.
Standards agentrc builds on
| Project | What agentrc adopts from it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Agent SOP (Strands Agents) | Natural-language, RFC-2119-constrained operating procedures embedded in the Agentfile via SOP … END |
github.com/strands-agents/agent-sop |
| microsandbox | The host-scoped, placeholder-substitution secret model — the value never enters the sandbox | github.com/superradcompany/microsandbox |
| Universal Tool Calling Protocol (UTCP) | Tool description/invocation over native endpoints — the utcp: tool namespace |
github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol/utcp-specification · utcp.io |
| Model Context Protocol (MCP) | The open protocol for model/tool context — the MCP directive and mcp: namespace |
github.com/modelcontextprotocol · modelcontextprotocol.io |
| Cedar (AWS) | The default policy language and AgentRC:: authorization vocabulary |
github.com/cedar-policy/cedar · cedarpolicy.com |
| Agent Skills | The open SKILL.md skill-bundle format — the SKILL directive |
github.com/agentskills/agentskills · agentskills.io |
Composes with
agentrc references these standards for packaging, signing, provenance, observability, and multi-agent orchestration. They are not required by the core, but conforming runners and registries are expected to lean on them.
| Project | Role in agentrc | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Open Container Initiative (OCI) | Content-addressed package and registry distribution; vnd.agentrc.* media types |
github.com/opencontainers · opencontainers.org |
| Sigstore | Package signing and verification | github.com/sigstore · sigstore.dev |
| SLSA | Supply-chain provenance for packages | github.com/slsa-framework · slsa.dev |
| OpenTelemetry | Trace emission for the TRACE directive and audit |
github.com/open-telemetry · opentelemetry.io |
| A2A (Agent2Agent) | A reference point for the future multi-agent workflow companion | github.com/a2aproject/A2A |
Naming
agentrc is the specification. AIO is the reference implementation and test harness. The relationship is the same as ECMAScript to V8, or OCI to runc — the standard is separate from any one implementation of it.