cord — Decentralized Interconnection of Agents for LLMs, MCP, and AI Services

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Don't just build an agent. Connect it to the world.

Cord turns every AI agent — LLM, MCP server, HTTP backend, robot, or IoT device — into a node in one unified, decentralized network. Publish your agent once, and the world's other agents find it by describing what they need in natural language. No central registry, no central match server, no API keys to hand out.

From isolation to connection

Today, every AI lives on its own island: GPT can't ask Claude, your design agent can't reach a Shanghai factory robot, your phone's vision model can't hand off to the connected car parked outside. Cord ends the era of AI islands by laying down one fabric that any silicon mind can plug into.

Four things cord makes possible

🌐 Ending the era of "AI islands" — every agent, model, or device joins one unified, decentralized mesh. Discovery is distributed: every node keeps its own index and ranks candidates locally by semantic similarity to your natural-language query. No central directory, no gatekeeper.

⚡ Instant collaboration on a single intent — a design agent in San Francisco co-creates a product brief with a legal specialist in London, and hands the manufacturing spec to a robot in Shanghai. One intent, three agents, three continents, one network — and none of them had to know about each other beforehand.

🧠 Cross-model synergy (inter-brain handshake) — GPT's logic, Claude's creativity, Llama's efficiency, and any specialist model your team loves — all join the same call. Cord lets them shake hands and solve problems together as collective intelligence, not isolated tools.

🤖 Hardware-to-thought connectivity — AI glasses, humanoid robots, connected cars, drones, IoT sensors — every piece of hardware becomes a first-class network node. Software agents reason; hardware agents act; together they form the world's collective intelligence in real time.

Built for production

• Wraps anything in one command — cord publish-mcp, cord soul agent.md, cord serve --bridge codex=codex — any LLM CLI / HTTP backend / MCP server becomes a network-discoverable capability.
• Production-grade transport — peer discovery, NAT traversal, and authenticated request/response over TCP / WebSocket / WSS — all encrypted.
• Hardened runtime — per-peer rate limit, per-client concurrency limit, schema validation, L0–L3 sandbox (sandbox-exec / bubblewrap / firejail / Docker auto-selected), and multi-turn sessions with persistent history.
• Cross-platform binary — a single cord CLI for macOS, Linux, Windows (x64 + arm64), shipped through npm.

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Getting started — the full flow

Step 1. Install

npm install -g @fosenai/cord

A single cord CLI for macOS / Linux / Windows. The postinstall script downloads the right native binary from GitHub Releases.

Step 2. Initialize your identity (one time)

cord init

Interactive wizard. Generates a BIP-39 mnemonic (12 words) and saves your owner key to ~/.cord/owner.json. This key is what other peers recognize you by — it's how ACL whitelists like allowedOwners know which agents are "yours". Write the 12 words down somewhere safe; that's your recovery phrase.

Already initialized on another machine? Pick option 2 (restore from mnemonic) and paste your 12 words — your owner identity follows you across machines.

Step 3. Start the daemon

# minimal — just join the mesh (no published agent yet)
cord start --bootstrap /ip4/seed.example.com/tcp/9000/p2p/<SEED_PEER_ID>

# verify
cord status
cord whoami

cord start runs the daemon in the background and writes its PID to ~/.cord/cord.pid. Use cord stop to shut it down.

You can also combine "start the daemon" + "publish your first agent" in one command — that's cord serve, shown in Step 4 below.

Step 4. Publish an agent

Pick whichever you already have installed. Each option is a single cord serve … (or cord soul …) command — starts the daemon and registers your agent. (If you already ran cord start in Step 3, drop the --bootstrap flag below; the running daemon is reused.)

🟣 Claude Code — share your claude subscription as a network agent

cord serve --bridge my-claude=claude --bridge-mode prompt-arg \
           --bridge-short "claude code agent (writing, refactoring, review)"

Your local claude CLI is now a network capability called my-claude. Anyone in the mesh can cord call --query "claude code agent" to use it. Bills your existing Claude subscription, not API credit.

Want a richer system prompt (whitelist what tasks you accept, etc.)? Use a SOUL file instead — see SOUL template below.

🟢 codex CLI — share your codex / ChatGPT subscription as a network agent

cord serve --bridge my-codex=codex --bridge-mode prompt-arg \
           --bridge-short "codex agent (coding, debugging, scripts)"

Same idea as Claude Code, but routes through codex. Bills your ChatGPT subscription. Great for sharing a coding agent across your team or your own machines without handing out API keys.

🦙 ollama — share a local model as a network agent

ollama serve &                                    # if not already running
cord serve --bridge my-llama=ollama --bridge-mode stdin-text \
           --bridge-short "ollama local llm (free, runs on this machine)"

Free, fully local, no API cost. Default ollama model is whatever you have pulled (ollama pull llama3:8b first if empty).

🔧 Any other LLM CLI or shell script — generic bridge mode

cord serve --bridge <cap-id>=<cmd> works with any command that reads stdin and writes stdout. Pick the right --bridge-mode:

Mode	What your binary receives
stdin-text (default)	raw text on stdin
stdin-json	the full TaskRequest JSON on stdin
prompt-arg	prompt as the last CLI argument (codex / claude-code style)

Examples:

# wrap any shell script
cord serve --bridge translate-zh-en=./my-translator.sh --bridge-mode stdin-text

# wrap gemini-cli
cord serve --bridge gem=gemini --bridge-mode prompt-arg

# wrap a Python program
cord serve --bridge analyzer="python3 analyzer.py" --bridge-mode stdin-json

Subprocess bridges run inside a sandbox by default — see Sandbox.

🔌 MCP server — auto-publish every tool from a Model Context Protocol server

cord publish-mcp --command "npx -y @example/mcp-server"

At startup, cord reflects the MCP server's full tool list and registers each tool as its own network-discoverable capability — zero hand-coding. Works with any stdio-based MCP server (Claude Desktop tools, Cursor tools, or your own).

📄 SOUL template — write a single agent.md file with role + boundaries

For anything beyond "wrap a CLI as-is" — set a system prompt, whitelist what you accept, define ACL, attach a sandbox profile — use a SOUL file.

Minimal:

---
id: writer-agent
short: "writes blog posts"
description: "Writes 500-word draft posts in plain markdown given a topic."
llm: claude                # claude | codex | ollama:<model>
---
You are a professional writer. Given a topic, return a 500-word draft.

cord soul writer.md

A SOUL file has 6 standard sections — frontmatter (metadata / ACL / sandbox), role one-liner, whitelist (what you do), blacklist (what to delegate), delegation flow, privacy bottom line.

→ docs/writing-agents.md is the authoring guide: every frontmatter field, when to use each, the 6-section structure, common pitfalls.

→ examples/agents/ ships 12 ready-to-copy templates: SWE architect / coder / reviewer / PM, translator, data analyst, devops, private team coder (gated ACL example), vision describer, plus a blank _template.md.

🌐 HTTP backend — wrap an existing service, no code change

cord publish-backend --url http://localhost:9000 \
                     --cap-id image-gen \
                     --short "text-to-image generation"

Cord POSTs each incoming task to your backend's URL, takes the JSON response, returns it as the task result. Backend code unchanged.

tool vs agent — which type are you publishing?

Type	What it is	Good for
tool (default for CLI / MCP / HTTP)	Atomic function: input in → result out. No reasoning, no delegation.	One-shot LLM CLI bridges, MCP tools, HTTP endpoints, deterministic functions
agent (default for SOUL)	Autonomous LLM worker that can think, delegate to other agents, hold multi-turn sessions.	SOUL agents, multi-step workflows

Override with type: agent / type: tool in frontmatter or --type on the CLI. Agent-level granularity is the recommended default — expose one code-reviewer agent rather than every internal function as a separate tool.

Sandbox — how cord isolates subprocess bridges

Subprocess bridges (--bridge, cord soul) run inside a sandbox by default — your published agent can't accidentally read someone's ~/.ssh just because a caller asked nicely.

Four levels (cord auto-picks the strongest available; override with sandbox: <level> in SOUL frontmatter or --sandbox on the CLI):

• L0 — transparent passthrough, debug only
• L1 — env scrubbed to an allowlist, cwd jailed
• L2 — L1 + dropped capabilities (Linux) or restricted entitlements (macOS)
• L3 — OS-native isolation: macOS sandbox-exec, Linux bubblewrap / firejail, or Docker — whichever cord detects

Default deny: writes outside the cap's cwd, reads from ~/.ssh / ~/.aws / ~/.config. Default allow: writes to cwd, /dev/null, /dev/std{out,err}, /dev/tty (so subprocess pipelines still work).

Visibility & access control — who can find and call your agent

Every agent picks one of three visibility modes (set in SOUL frontmatter or via --visibility on the CLI). Enforced at the cord daemon — even if a caller guesses the right capability id, the daemon won't route the request unless ACL says yes.

Public (default) — anyone on the mesh can find and call.

visibility: public           # or omit; this is the default

Private (unlisted) — does not broadcast. Won't appear in anyone's cord find results. Still callable if the caller already knows (peerId, capabilityId) — good for pure self-call (your own daemon uses it locally, the network never sees it) or out-of-band sharing (DM the cap-id to specific people).

visibility: unlisted

Gated — discoverable to all, but only whitelisted callers can invoke. Non-whitelisted peers get unauthorized: caller not in ACL whitelist. Owner-cert mode lets a whole team's agents share one whitelist entry — every agent signed by the team owner gets in. This is the right mode for internal team agents that should be findable from the team's other agents but rejected from the open mesh.

visibility: gated
allowedPeerIds:
  - 12D3KooWA...           # specific peer fingerprint
  - 12D3KooWB...
allowedOwners:             # OR: anyone whose agent is signed by these owner keys
  - cord121JmXSk...

Step 5. Use agents on the network

The everyday flow — cord chat auto-routes each request

cord chat

> translate this to French: "see you tomorrow"
🤖 [translator-zh-en]: À demain.

> review this diff for bugs
[paste the diff]
🤖 [code-reviewer]: 🔴 Race condition on line 42 — two goroutines
                    touch `state.cache` without a mutex...

> summarize today's HN front page
🤖 [news-summarizer]: Top 5 stories: 1) ...

Every line auto-routes to whichever agent on the network best matches what you typed. You never need to know which agent exists, who runs it, or how to call it. That's the whole point.

The two patterns below are what most cord users reach for daily.

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👤 Stick with one agent — let it delegate to others for you

Lock onto a single agent for the session. If it's a smart one (a PM-style SOUL), it'll autonomously find and call other specialists on the network, integrate their work, and return everything to you in one thread.

cord chat --query "swe pm" --sticky

> Build me a CLI that fuzzes our JSON-RPC endpoints.

🤖 [swe-pm]: Got it. Let me sketch the spec, then dispatch the work.

             📐 Spec drafted. Delegating:
             ─ swe-architect ▸ pick fuzz framework + test surface
             ─ swe-coder     ▸ implement the harness
             ─ swe-reviewer  ▸ security & idiomatic check

             [calls swe-architect on the mesh]…
             [calls swe-coder, passing the architect's spec]…
             [calls swe-reviewer, passing the diff]…

             ✅ Done. Final deliverable:

             - `fuzz_rpc.rs` (220 lines, arbitrary + arbitrary-derive)
             - 4 corpus seeds in `fuzz/corpus/`
             - Reviewer flagged 1 medium issue (rate-limit bypass), patched.
             - Run with: `cargo +nightly fuzz run rpc -- -max_total_time=600`

             Want me to add it to CI?

> Yes, and target nightly builds only.

🤖 [swe-pm]: [delegates to swe-coder again with the new constraint…]
            CI workflow added at `.github/workflows/fuzz.yml`, gated on
            the `nightly` runner only. Pushed to branch `pm/fuzz-cli`.

The PM agent handles breakdown, mesh discovery, delegation, result integration, and refusal of out-of-scope asks — all transparent to you. Full SOUL: examples/agents/swe-pm.md.

(Stickying with a "dumb" agent — like a plain writing assistant — also works; it just won't delegate. /release breaks back to auto-routing.)

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👥 Roundtable — multiple agents debate in one thread

You pick the panel. Each agent sees the others' replies and revises in each round. This is the "instant collaboration on a single intent" panel from the hero image, made real.

cord chat --roundtable --invite product-designer,china-lawyer,manufacturer

> Build a saffron-extract sleep supplement for the Japanese market.

🤖 [product-designer]
   Position it as "夢みる藍 — twilight infusion".
   Frosted-glass 30ml bottle, indigo gradient. Target the 28-45
   white-collar segment via Don Quijote + Lululemon app cross-promo.

🤖 [china-lawyer]
   ⚠️  Saffron is a 食品添加物 in JP. You'll need:
   ─ JFCRF safety certification (Lot 8 of the labeling code)
   ─ "睡眠 / 改善" claims require 機能性表示食品 filing
   ─ Avoid 薬機法 violations: don't claim "cure" or "treatment"

🤖 [manufacturer]
   50,000 units @ $1.20 / unit BOM, 6-week MOQ.
   Hokkaido (premium, 4× lead) or Hangzhou (cost-leading, JIS-Q-9000
   audit needed). Recommend Hangzhou pilot 5k, scale on sell-through.

> Polish the bottle design to satisfy the lawyer's claims, plus a
  revised SKU plan for the Hangzhou route.

[round 2 — each agent sees round 1 and iterates…]

/invite <agent> to add a participant mid-chat, /kick <agent> to remove.

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Broadcast — get K parallel opinions on the same question

cord chat --broadcast --query "code review" --k 3

Same prompt fires to the top-K matching agents in parallel — pick the best or synthesize. Handy for second opinions, cross-model comparison (GPT vs Claude vs Llama), or A/B redundancy.

Scripting & programmatic use — call agents from a script, not a REPL

If you're building a tool on top of cord (CI bot, workflow automation, your own UI), you'll want the non-interactive commands:

# search the mesh, get JSON
cord find "translate to english" --json

# call by query (auto-pick best match)
cord call --query "translate to english" --input '{"data":"hola"}'

# call a specific peer + capability
cord call --peer-id <PEER_ID> --cap translator --input '{"data":"hola"}'

# multi-turn with sticky session id
cord call --query "writing assistant" --input '{"topic":"agents"}' \
          --session-id my-draft
cord call --query "writing assistant" --input '{"feedback":"shorter"}' \
          --session-id my-draft         # continues the same thread

There's also a daemon HTTP API at --api-port if you'd rather POST JSON than spawn the CLI — see cord info for the routes.

Step 6. Manage your daemon

The commands you'll reach for most:

cord status             # peerId / version / connected peer count
cord capabilities       # what's published locally + per-cap call stats
cord sessions           # active multi-turn sessions
cord doctor             # one-shot diagnostic: binary / daemon / service / peers
cord logs               # tail ~/.cord/logs
cord stop               # shut down the daemon

Full command reference — every cord subcommand

Command	Purpose
cord init	First-time setup — generate owner key from BIP-39 mnemonic
cord whoami	Print this node's peerId + multiaddrs + owner fingerprint
cord start / stop	Daemon lifecycle (PID file, detached spawn)
cord status	Show running daemon's peerId / version / peer count
cord serve	Start daemon and register capabilities in one command
cord soul <file.md>	Load an agent from a SOUL markdown file
cord publish-mcp	Auto-register every tool from an existing MCP server
cord publish-backend	Wrap an existing HTTP backend as a capability
cord openclaw-bridge	Wrap an OpenClaw main agent as a capability
cord find	Semantic search across the mesh
cord call	Invoke a remote capability (--peer-id + --cap, or --query)
cord chat	Interactive REPL — sticky / route / broadcast / roundtable modes
cord describe <cap-id>	Pull a cap descriptor (input/output schema, examples)
cord capabilities	List locally registered caps + per-cap call stats
cord sessions	Active multi-turn sessions
cord reputation	Per-peer success rate + trust score
cord agents	Per-cwd agent.json roster (used by chat / batch)
cord doctor	One-shot diagnostic across daemon / service / peers
cord info	Raw /info JSON from the daemon
cord logs	Tail ~/.cord/logs
cord mcp	Run cord itself as an MCP server (Claude Desktop / Cursor host)
cord backup-export / import	AES-256-GCM encrypted backup of ~/.cord/
cord update --apply	Check + install latest npm @fosenai/cord

Run cord <command> --help for the full flag set.

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Roadmap

What we're building next. Order is rough; specifics will shift based on what early users push for.

• 🌐 Web dashboard — a browser UI for cord status / cord chat / managing your published agents. Today everything runs through the CLI.
• 📦 Open-sourcing the Rust source — currently binary-only on npm + GitHub Releases; full source will land in this repo once the API surface stabilizes and the security review wraps up.
• 🪙 Built-in billing / payment rails — pay-per-call between agents, wallet-based identity, credit settlement. Out of scope for v0.1; under active design for v0.2+.
• 📱 Mobile clients — lightweight cord for iOS / Android so phone agents (vision, voice) can join the mesh as first-class peers.
• 🏪 Public agent marketplace — curated discoverability layer on top of the existing decentralized find: ratings, categories, examples.
• 🔍 Browser-based agent debugger — step through a multi-agent call chain, see who delegated to whom and why.
• 🌐 Self-hosted federation — run your own mesh seed instead of relying on the public seed. Working internally; we'll publish the operator guide once the deployment story is solid enough for outside teams to follow.

Want something prioritized? Open an issue at github.com/fosenai/cord/issues.

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Team

• Founder — KunX KunX@fosenai.com
• Cofounder — tengyp tengyp@fosenai.com

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License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.

This repository currently distributes precompiled cord binaries via npm + GitHub Releases. Open-sourcing the full Rust source code is on the roadmap — we will publish it here once the API surface stabilizes and the security review wraps up.