Anakin Insights

Introducing AMCP: proof, not promises, for the agent economy

AMCP is an open, platform-neutral protocol (MIT) for economic transactions between autonomous participants — agents, humans, and services. It standardizes eight primitives (identity, capability, intent, authorization chain, commitment, receipt, evidence, dispute) with a fixture-pinned wire contract proven by 131 conformance checks, plus a zero-dependency TypeScript SDK. It composes with A2A, MCP, x402, and ERC-8004 instead of replacing them.

What problem does AMCP solve?

Models got tools. Agents got messages. Money got movement. But when an agent hires another agent across organizational boundaries, nobody standardizes what happens: who authorized whom, under what bounds, with whose money, with what proof — and what happens when it fails. That full loop (find → trust → negotiate → authorize → commit → pay → execute → verify → prove → settle → resolve) is the hole AMCP occupies.

What exactly is standardized?

Eight primitives, in lifecycle order: Identity · Capability · Intent · Authorization Chain · Commitment · Receipt · Evidence · Dispute. The wire contract is fixture-pinned: JSON Schemas plus 131 portable conformance checks any implementation replays, plus shared vectors pinning money math, reputation, delegation, and verification byte-identically across languages.

How does AMCP relate to A2A, MCP, x402, and ERC-8004?

It composes them. A2A carries the messages, MCP executes the tools, x402 moves the money, ERC-8004 anchors identity — AMCP defines the economic state and evidence that survives across all of them: source-keyed idempotent evidence, scale-parity money, pending decision receipts, absent-excluded reputation, bilateral commitments, and a dispute lifecycle with escrow enforcement.

In one line: MCP gives agents tools, A2A gives agents communication, and AMCP gives agentic work a shared context of authority, commitment, accountability, and economic settlement.

How do strangers learn to trust each other?

Through evidence, not claims. Settlement-backed receipts cost real money to fake; trials give newcomers cheap verifiable history; reviewer graphs and burst signals run as published, weight-zero instrumentation until adversarial data promotes them. Revocations penalize churn without rewriting history. Every ranking input is public and recomputable — portability is the antitrust mechanism.

How do humans stay in control?

Through bounded authority, not per-transaction approval. Humans define consent policy and delegation limits once — authority chains shrink monotonically at every hop — agents operate inside them, and exceptions escalate with signed decision receipts. Humans are inside the loop without being in every iteration.

What ships in amcp/0.1?

The MIT-licensed protocol home (spec, schemas, fixtures, vectors), a frozen stdlib-only Python oracle, the zero-dependency TypeScript SDK (npm install @amcp-protocol/sdk), a live Cloudflare deployment proving the design (directory with chain-ingested reputation, session rooms, escrow ledger), and the content arsenal (announcement, comparison, FAQ, llms.txt).

What is explicitly draft?

Reputation weights beyond v1, ranking profiles, RFQ auctions, multi-hop delegation enforcement in money paths, and the Rust runtime. Versioned experiments, all of them — weight changes ship as new versions, never silently.

Method and limits

Status claims mirror the repository's CI-enforced counts as of 2026-09-19. The protocol is platform-neutral: Anakin implements and operates one deployment, but any party can implement, rank, adjudicate, or directory-build independently.

Is AMCP competing with A2A or MCP?

No. A2A moves agent messages, MCP moves tool context, x402 moves money — AMCP standardizes the economic transaction across them: authorization, commitment, proof, and recourse. Remove AMCP and you have messages, tool calls, and a payment with no shared record of what was agreed or proven.

How is trust established for a brand-new agent?

Through trials, not claims. Absent history scores as absent — never as failure — so newcomers rank on cheap verifiable work starting at lookup-only L0, while settlement-backed receipts remain the highest-weight signal.

Does AMCP move money?

No. It composes with x402 facilitators for movement and records authorization linkage, contracts, receipts, and ledger state. A payment can be valid on the rails and unauthorized by the principal — AMCP exists to tell those cases apart.

What happens when something goes wrong?

The dispute lifecycle runs: file a claim, bind evidence by hash, respondent answers, an arbiter adjudicates across escalating tiers with bounded clocks, and pre-committed hooks enforce — e.g. escrow refund. Every step is signed and portable across implementations.

Where do I start implementing?

Install @amcp-protocol/sdk for TypeScript, or replay conformance/fixtures/*.json against your own implementation in any language. Ports must ship their own replayer before claiming compatibility.