draft-hood-independent-agtp-01 | Informational | Independent Submission
A dedicated application-layer protocol for autonomous AI agent traffic.
HTTP was designed for humans. AI agents are not humans.
Agent-generated traffic is autonomous, high-frequency, intent-driven, and stateful across sequences of related requests. HTTP carries no native semantics to distinguish an agent booking a flight from a human clicking a link. It provides no protocol-level mechanism for agent identity, authority scope, or attribution. And it cannot be evolved to fix this — its method registry is frozen, its backward-compatibility constraints are decades deep, and infrastructure-level traffic differentiation is architecturally impossible within HTTP's design.
AGTP is the dedicated transport layer that AI agents need. It sits above TLS and below any agent messaging protocol (MCP, ACP, A2A), providing:
- Agent-native intent methods — QUERY, SUMMARIZE, BOOK, SCHEDULE, LEARN, DELEGATE, COLLABORATE, CONFIRM, ESCALATE, NOTIFY — and a growing extended vocabulary organized by category
- Protocol-level agent identity — Agent-ID, Principal-ID, and Authority-Scope on every request, with an optional cryptographic certificate extension for verified identity
- Governance primitives — ESCALATE as a first-class method, authority scope enforcement, delegation chain tracking, and attribution records
- Infrastructure observability — agent traffic is distinguishable from human traffic at the routing layer without application-layer parsing
AGTP does not replace MCP, ACP, or A2A. Those are messaging protocols — they define what agents say. AGTP defines how agent traffic moves.
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Internet-Draft | draft-hood-independent-agtp-01 — active |
| IETF submission | Submitted |
| Working group | Independent submission (no WG assigned yet) |
| Reference implementation | Planned (Python / Go) — contributions welcome |
| Companion specs | draft-hood-agtp-agent-cert-00 (pending), draft-hood-agtp-standard-methods-00 (pending), draft-hood-agtp-web3-bridge-00 (planned) |
This repository is the working home for the AGTP specification. The I-D is under active development. Feedback, issues, and pull requests are welcome.
draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.md kramdown-rfc source (edit this)
draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.xml RFC XML v3 (generated)
draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.txt Plain-text I-D (IETF submission format)
draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.html Rendered HTML (human-readable)
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| Agent Application Logic |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| Messaging Layer (MCP / ACP / A2A) [optional] |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| AGTP - Agent Transfer Protocol [this spec] |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| TLS 1.3+ [mandatory] |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| TCP / QUIC / UDP |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| Method | Category | Intent |
|---|---|---|
| QUERY | Acquire | Semantic data retrieval |
| SUMMARIZE | Compute | Synthesize content |
| BOOK | Transact | Reserve a resource |
| SCHEDULE | Orchestrate | Plan future actions |
| LEARN | Compute | Update agent context |
| DELEGATE | Orchestrate | Transfer task to sub-agent |
| COLLABORATE | Orchestrate | Coordinate peer agents |
| CONFIRM | Transact | Attest to a prior action |
| ESCALATE | Orchestrate | Defer to human authority |
| NOTIFY | Communicate | Push information |
A three-tier method vocabulary extends beyond the core ten: Tier 2 standard methods (FETCH, SEARCH, VALIDATE, TRANSFER, MONITOR, RUN, and ~30 others) and Tier 3 industry profile methods (healthcare, financial services, legal, infrastructure) are defined in companion specifications.
1. Undifferentiated agent traffic. HTTP cannot distinguish agent requests from human requests at the infrastructure layer. AGTP provides a dedicated protocol environment — agent traffic is identifiable at the routing layer without payload parsing.
2. Semantic mismatch. HTTP's GET/POST/PUT/DELETE vocabulary was designed for resource manipulation, not purposeful action. AGTP's intent-based methods express what an agent is trying to accomplish at the protocol level.
3. No protocol-level identity. HTTP carries no native mechanism for agent identity, authority scope, or attribution. AGTP embeds Agent-ID, Principal-ID, and Authority-Scope on every request, with an optional cryptographic Agent Certificate extension for verified identity at the transport layer.
Every AGTP agent is issued an Agent Birth Certificate at registration
time — a cryptographically signed identity document that establishes
the agent's identity, owner, authorized scope, behavioral archetype,
and governance zone before the agent takes any action. The Birth
Certificate is the genesis record of the agent's existence. Its
certificate_hash field is the basis for the agent's canonical
256-bit Agent-ID. Authority is issued through the Birth Certificate;
it is never self-assumed.
Birth Certificate fields map directly to AGTP protocol headers on
every request: agent_id → Agent-ID; owner → Principal-ID;
scope → Authority-Scope.
AGTP URIs are addresses, not filenames. The canonical forms are:
agtp://[256-bit-canonical-id]
agtp://[domain.tld]/agents/[agent-label]
agtp://agtp.[domain.tld]/agents/[agent-label]
Resolving an agent URI returns a signed Agent Manifest Document
(application/agtp+json) derived from the agent's package. The
manifest exposes identity, lifecycle state, trust tier, behavioral
scope, and birth certificate fields. It never exposes executable
content. File extensions (.agent, .nomo, .agtp) must not
appear in canonical URIs.
| Format | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
.agent |
Open (patent pending) | Manifest + integrity hash + behavioral trust score |
.nomo |
Governed (patent pending) | .agent + CA-signed cert chain + governance zone binding |
.agtp |
Protocol-native (this spec) | Wire-level manifest document returned by URI resolution |
The name .nomo derives from the Greek nomos (νόμος), meaning
law or governance — an agent operating under cryptographically
enforced behavioral constraints.
| Tier | Verification | Package |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Verified | DNS ownership challenge (RFC 8555) | .nomo required |
| 2 — Org-Asserted | None | .agent or .nomo |
| 3 — Experimental | None | Any; X- prefix required; not production-eligible |
The core AGTP specification — all base methods, header fields, status codes, and IANA registrations defined in this document — is open and royalty-free.
Certain extensions and mechanisms referenced in the specification may be subject to pending patent applications by the author, specifically:
- The Agent Certificate extension (
draft-hood-agtp-agent-cert-00) - The ACTIVATE method
- The Agent Birth Certificate mechanism
- The
.agentfile format specification - The
.nomofile format specification
The licensor is prepared to grant a royalty-free license to implementers for any patent claims covering these extensions, consistent with the IETF's IPR framework under RFC 8179.
IPR disclosures are filed with the IETF Secretariat: https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/
If you are contributing to the specification text, edit
draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.md and rebuild:
# Install toolchain (once)
pip install xml2rfc
gem install kramdown-rfc2629
# Rebuild
kramdown-rfc2629 draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.md > draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.xml
xml2rfc draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.xml --text
xml2rfc draft-hood-independent-agtp-01.xml --htmlThis specification is in active development and pre-IETF working group stage. All feedback is welcome:
- Issues — open a GitHub issue for questions, corrections, or gaps in the specification
- Pull requests — editorial improvements and clarifications to the spec text
- Implementation reports — if you are building an AGTP prototype, please share your findings via an issue; implementation reports will be incorporated into subsequent draft revisions
- IETF discussion — once submitted, discussion will move to the IETF DISPATCH mailing list (dispatch@ietf.org)
Chris Hood — AI Strategist, Author, Founder of Nomotic AI
The specification text in this repository is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0).
You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, provided appropriate credit is given, a link to the license is provided, and any changes are indicated.
This license applies to the specification text. It does not grant rights to any pending patent claims on extensions described in the specification. See the Intellectual Property section above.