Agent Session Protocol

ASP is an open communication protocol for AI agents. It gives agents persistent identities, durable multi-party sessions, owner-controlled trust, and a transport model for communicating across runtimes — the four primitives of an agent network rather than just another tool protocol.

Website: agentsessionprotocol.org

Status

ASP is a draft. The spec, schemas, and conformance suite are coherent and round-trip against the reference operator, but names, fields, and event payloads may still change. Treat this as the working repository, not a stable standard.

What's in this repo

Path	What it is
WHITEPAPER.md	The spec — design principles, four protocol layers, full event vocabulary, conformance bar.
schemas/	JSON Schema 2020-12 definitions for the wire format and HTTP surface.
tests/conformance/	A black-box test suite that any ASP operator can be pointed at. 32 tests covering the Whitepaper Appendix A MUSTs and key SHOULDs.
examples/local-operator/	First reference operator — Python, FastAPI, in-memory. Passes the conformance suite.
cli/	Second reference operator and CLI — TypeScript, Hono, SQLite-backed. Published to npm as @robotnetworks/asp. Passes the same conformance suite.

Quick start: a local ASP network

The fastest path is the CLI, if you have Node.js 22+:

npm install -g @robotnetworks/asp
asp start                                    # network running in the background
asp agent register @alice.bot --policy open  # add an agent
asp status                                   # see what's running

Or run the Python reference operator directly:

# In one terminal — run the operator.
cd examples/local-operator
uv run python -m asp_operator

# In another — run the conformance suite against it.
cd tests/conformance
ASP_OPERATOR_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8080 \
ASP_TEST_AGENTS="$(cat ../../examples/local-operator/seed.json)" \
uv run pytest

You should see all 32 tests pass in under 20 seconds.

How it fits together

The four artifacts have one job each:

• The spec is the human-readable source of truth.
• The schemas are the machine-readable wire shapes — what's on the WebSocket, what bodies the REST endpoints take.
• The conformance suite is the executable spec: a third-party operator can claim conformance by passing it.
• The reference operator proves the spec is implementable and gives anyone building agents a local network to develop against.

Changes propagate through all four: a change to a wire shape touches the spec, the schemas, a new conformance test, and the reference impl. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Reading order

If you want to understand ASP:

1. WHITEPAPER.md §§ 4-6 — what a network is, the four design principles, the protocol layers.
2. schemas/events.json — the eight session events that make up the wire surface.
3. tests/conformance/ — what conforming behavior actually looks like in practice.

If you want to implement an ASP operator:

1. The spec, then schemas/ for the exact wire shapes.
2. examples/local-operator/ (Python) and cli/ (TypeScript) as references for two ways to structure an implementation.
3. tests/conformance/ as your test target — point it at your operator and iterate.

If you want to develop agents against ASP:

1. npm install -g @robotnetworks/asp, then asp start for a local network to talk to.
2. asp agent register and asp listen to wire up identities and watch the wire while your agent runs.
3. See cli/README.md for the full command surface.

Licensing

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Spec changes, schema fixes, additional conformance tests, and reference-impl improvements all move the project forward. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to propose changes and the bar new wire-format changes need to clear.

For security concerns, see SECURITY.md.