Agent Capability Contract Open contract for A2B systems

CONFORMANCE

ACC conformance responsibilities, evidence expectations, and machine-readable reference vectors.

View source on GitHub

ACC Conformance Checklist

This checklist records ACC v1 runtime responsibilities. Before making a compatibility claim, select the applicable Parser, Generator, Runtime, or Policy Component profile in PROFILES.md.

Use SELF_ASSESSMENT.md to publish evidence and register an implementation. ACC currently uses self-assessment, not official certification.

Parser implementations normally complete the Parser section. Runtime implementations complete every applicable section. Generator and Policy Component requirements are defined in their profiles because they do not own the full runtime lifecycle.

Parser

  • Reads x-agent-capability from OpenAPI operation objects.
  • Requires version, enabled, and scope.
  • Skips or reports unsupported version values.
  • Preserves OpenAPI parameters and requestBody schemas.
  • Ignores unknown ACC fields safely.
  • Preserves implementation-specific extensions without treating them as security policy.

Exposure

  • Does not expose operations with enabled: false.
  • Does not expose operations without a non-empty scope.
  • Applies route or policy allowlists using scope.
  • Hides subject.required capabilities when no trusted acting subject exists.
  • Provides diagnostics for skipped operations.

Governance

  • Applies safe risk defaults.
  • Detects risk.level: high before invocation.
  • Detects approval.required before invocation.
  • Treats approval.required: true as unconditional approval intent.
  • Evaluates approval.when with ANY semantics when unconditional approval is not required.
  • Treats an absent or empty approval.when as no conditional approval intent.
  • Requires every approval.when.param to resolve to a declared, typed OpenAPI parameter.
  • Uses strict JSON type-aware comparison for approval conditions; does not coerce strings into numbers or booleans.
  • Rejects a condition parameter whose invocation value is incompatible with its declared schema before calling the business operation.
  • Applies execution.rate_limit or maps it to runtime limits.
  • Applies execution.timeout_ms or maps it to runtime timeout policy.
  • Treats audit.sensitive as a redaction or summarization hint.

Authority Boundary

  • Does not treat ACC as final business authorization.
  • Propagates or requires a trusted acting subject when subject.required is true.
  • Lets the business system decide whether the subject may perform the operation.
  • Does not allow model-generated text to override scope, risk, approval, subject, or audit decisions.

Traceability

  • Records which ACC capability was exposed.
  • Records risk and approval decisions.
  • Records invocation result or failure summary.
  • Redacts sensitive values when requested.

Machine-readable ACC v1 inputs and abstract expected outcomes are available in v1/README.md. They complement this checklist; they do not create an official certification program.

Claim Language

Recommended wording:

This project implements ACC v1 OpenAPI declarations.

Avoid:

This project is officially ACC certified.

There is no certification program until one is explicitly published by the ACC maintainers.