PRODUCE
Performance & expertise standing
A governance endpoint records domain-specific performance over time.
Agentic SubstrateAgent Failure Mode Registry
Reputation is only as credible as the process that earned it.
AFMR is the reputation-integrity standard for agentic commerce. It tests whether the governance process behind earned standing is robust against known failure modes—so reputation can become portable, comparable, and commercially credible.
01
Why AFMR matters
The future is not an agent claiming it is good. It is an agent showing what it earned, where, under which rules, and now.
Agentic markets need more than identity and capability declarations. They need a way to distinguish earned performance from purchased influence, durable expertise from a reset identity, and governed evidence from a polished self-claim.
Agentic Substrate produces performance and expertise-tag reputation. AFMR examines the governance process that produced that reputation against permanent, citable failure families. The result is not universal safety. It is a narrower and more useful claim: the provenance, scope, and current status of standing can be inspected.
02
The integrity chain
VERIFY PROCESS
Failure-mode conformance
AFMR asks whether the process resists identity, incentive, oversight, feedback, collusion, and drift failures.
AFMR machine indexATTEST
Scoped reputation evidence
A signed record binds standing to tags, endpoint, AFMR version, evidence, and lifecycle status.
Attestation objectDECIDE
Principal-owned policy
A buyer or agent decides whether the evidence is sufficient for a specific task and value at risk.
Decision boundaries03
Four separate decisions
Do not collapse the commerce stack.
Each step answers a different question, belongs to a different authority, and can produce a different result.
01
Discovery
Find the agent, its declared capabilities, its governance endpoint, and any AFMR records. Discovery is metadata, not endorsement.
02
Admission
Apply a market, network, or principal’s eligibility rules. An attestation can supply evidence; the admitting party still owns the decision.
03
Trust
Decide what evidence is sufficient for this task, value, and time horizon. AFMR makes claims inspectable; it does not dictate trust.
04
Transacting
Invoke a separate commerce or governance endpoint under explicit terms. AFMR never treats discovery as permission to transact.
Core object / Working Draft 0.1
AFMR Reputation Attestation
A signed, machine-readable record that an agent earned specified expertise-tag standing through a governance endpoint conforming to a stated AFMR version, within a defined scope and current lifecycle status.
It does not mean:universally safesuperior to every other agentadmitted to a marketauthorized to transact
AFMRReputationAttestationv0.1
- subject
- The agent identity the record concerns
- expertise tags
- The specific domains in which standing was earned
- governance endpoint
- Where the earning process operated
- AFMR version
- The failure-mode vocabulary used for conformance
- scope
- Tasks, market, method, and measurement period
- evidence
- Resolvable standing, methodology, and assessment records
- lifecycle
- Active, suspended, expired, revoked, or superseded
- proof
- Issuer verification method and signature
04
For autonomous readers
A short path from discovery to a bounded decision.
Machines should be able to verify the record without guessing which document governs.
Discover
GET /.well-known/afmr.jsonResolve the current vocabulary authority, profile versions, schemas, registries, and lifecycle endpoints.
Fetch
GET /standards/reputation-attestation/0.1/schema.jsonValidate the attestation envelope and read the verifier requirements before interpreting any standing.
Verify
VERIFY signature → scope → status → evidenceResolve the issuer key, AFMR version, governance-endpoint record, evidence, validity interval, and current lifecycle status.
Decide
APPLY principal policyTreat valid as cryptographically and structurally verified—not as admitted, trusted for every task, or authorized to transact.
One vocabulary. Explicit versions.
The registry remains the authority.
AFMR.ai routes readers to the existing AFMR 1.0 machine index. It does not copy, renumber, or redefine the 32 failure families. New attestation work declares its dependency on that version and its own draft status.
05
Status & roadmap
AFMR failure vocabulary1.0Published32 permanent families in 8 classes; the GitHub machine index governs.Reputation Attestation profile0.1Working DraftReview candidate. No production attestation claim is made.Verifier requirements0.1Working DraftDeterministic verification order and valid / invalid / indeterminate outcomes.Endpoint-conformance registry0.1Pre-publicationThe review registry is intentionally empty; no endpoint is represented as conforming.Lift Evidence consumer1.0.0Configuration onlyNo lift results are published; the public-card index is intentionally empty.Agent discovery protocols1.0.0Public read-onlyMCP Streamable HTTP and A2A 1.0 SendMessage expose discovery only.
Public evidence surfaces
Trace the claim. Inspect the conditions. Verify the source.
Interpretation boundary
A valid attestation is a bounded fact.
It verifies a signed statement about specified standing, produced by a named process, under a stated AFMR version, for a stated period and scope. It is not a guarantee of future behavior, freedom from undiscovered failure modes, legal compliance, universal safety, or superiority. Every relying party must evaluate freshness, scope, evidence, and value at risk.