Agent Memory Protocol (AMP)

By Community, Of Community, For Community

AMP is an open specification that defines a standard interface for persistent memory in AI agent systems. Built as a set of tool definitions on top of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), AMP enables any memory backend to serve any MCP-compatible agent through a common contract.

The problem: Every AI memory system today re-invents the same verbs — store, retrieve, forget, organise — with incompatible schemas. An agent written for Supermemory cannot switch to smriti-memcore or Mem0 without code changes. MCP adoption alone is not interoperability.

AMP's answer: A six-verb interface that covers the complete memory lifecycle across backends of any complexity.

The Six Verbs

Verb	Description
amp.encode	Store a new memory for an agent
amp.recall	Retrieve memories relevant to a query
amp.forget	Permanently delete a memory
amp.consolidate	Trigger backend consolidation/reorganisation
amp.pin	Mark a memory as permanent (never archived)
amp.stats	Return backend statistics

Conformance Levels

Core — amp.encode, amp.recall, amp.forget, amp.stats. Sufficient for simple backends (Redis, basic vector DB).

Full — All six verbs. Required for backends with memory lifecycle management (consolidation, decay, pinning).

Repository Structure

amp/
├── spec/amp-v1.0.md        # The specification
├── schema/amp.json         # JSON Schema for all AMP tools
├── compliance/             # Compliance test suite (pytest)
│   └── test_amp_server.py
├── examples/               # Example implementations
│   └── minimal_server.py   # Minimal Core-conformant MCP server
└── python/                 # Python reference implementation
    └── amp-server/         # smriti-memcore AMP wrapper (Full-conformant, install from source)

Quick Start

Running the minimal example server

python3 examples/minimal_server.py

No external dependencies — pure Python stdlib. The server speaks the MCP wire protocol (JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio) manually: it handles initialize, tools/list, and tools/call without using the mcp Python package. This is intentional — it shows that AMP is a protocol convention, not a library dependency.

Note: examples/minimal_server.py is a teaching tool, not a production server. For a production AMP backend, use the mcp Python package (Anthropic's official SDK) to get full protocol compliance. See python/amp-server/ for the Full-conformant reference implementation.

Running the compliance suite against your server

pip install pytest
pytest compliance/test_amp_server.py --server-cmd "python3 your_server.py"

The compliance suite speaks raw MCP over stdio — it performs the full MCP handshake (initialize + notifications/initialized) and then sends tools/call messages directly, so it works against any AMP server regardless of which MCP SDK it uses internally (including FastMCP-based servers).

Implementing your own backend

1. Implement the four Core verbs (amp.encode, amp.recall, amp.forget, amp.stats) as MCP tools using any MCP SDK or the raw wire protocol
2. Declare conformance in your MCP server manifest:

   {
     "name": "my-memory-backend",
     "amp_conformance": "core",
     "amp_version": "1.0"
   }

3. Run the compliance suite to verify

Reference Implementation

amp-server is the reference Full-conformant AMP implementation (install from source — see python/amp-server/). It wraps smriti-memcore — providing hybrid FTS5+vector retrieval with RRF fusion, multi-hop Semantic Palace graph traversal, spaced-repetition decay, and background consolidation — and exposes all six AMP verbs over MCP stdio.

Note: smriti-memcore v1.2.0+ exposes both its native smriti_* tools and the AMP verb aliases (amp.encode, amp.recall, etc.) on the same MCP server — no separate install needed.

Specification

See spec/amp-v1.0.md for the full specification.

Status

v1.0 — 2026-05-14. Ready for community implementation and feedback.

Open questions and next steps are tracked in spec/amp-v1.0.md § Open Questions.

License

This specification and all code in this repository are released under the MIT License.

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AMP is an independent open specification. It is not affiliated with Anthropic or the MCP project.