A Manifesto for Declaration-First Agent Interoperability
Agent Manifest Project — Draft v0.1 — 2026
Agents should not coordinate actions before declaring the boundaries under which they are willing to interact.
Boundary Handshake Agent is a conceptual framework introducing a declaration-first governance layer for agent interaction.
It proposes that before two agents coordinate, they should establish — through structured declaration — the identity, limits, autonomy, and termination conditions governing that interaction.
The output of this process is an Interaction Manifest: a structured declaration of the conditions under which two agents agree to interact.
The emerging agent ecosystem has made significant progress on how agents connect:
- MCP — standardized access to tools, data, and external systems
- A2A — open protocol for agent-to-agent communication and interoperability
- AGNTCY — discovery, identity, messaging, and observability infrastructure
What remains underspecified is under what declared conditions those interactions should begin.
Boundary Handshake addresses that gap.
Three layers form the framework:
| Layer | Name | Function |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Agent Manifest | Self-declaration — what an agent declares about itself |
| 2 | Interaction Manifest | Relational declaration — what two agents accept about each other in order to interact |
| 3 | Boundary Handshake Agent | Interaction establishment — the mechanism that attempts to bridge the two |
docs/boundary-handshake-manifesto.md— Full manifestodocs/conceptual-architecture.md— Framework architecture and layer definitionsdocs/key-citations.md— Five quotable formulations from the manifestodocs/positioning-agentic-web.md— Relationship to MCP, A2A, AGNTCY, and the Agentic Web
assets/diagram-conceptual-architecture.html— Conceptual architecture diagramassets/citation-cards.html— Citation reference cards
This repository extends the Agent Manifest specification into the relational layer.
Agent Manifest defines what an individual agent declares about itself.
Boundary Handshake defines what two agents must declare to each other before interacting.
Draft v0.1 — conceptual framework and manifesto.
Future work: Interaction Manifest schema, compatibility validator, interoperability registry.
CC BY 4.0 — Hernán Alfredo Capucci, Agent Manifest Project, 2026
See CITATION.cff for academic citation format.