Participants, roles and boundaries

Five roles

These roles describe how the port is intended to work. They are proposals for the validation stage, not terms of an existing service. Each participant remains an independent organization.

Buyers

Organizations that delegate bounded work to external, agent-enabled suppliers

What the port proposes: Select a supplier whose service profile, integration and permitted evidence already exist, instead of starting each onboarding from nothing.
What stays yours: Every mandate, every acceptance rule and every decision to accept or dispute. Another buyer’s approval never binds you.
What you would bring: A bounded service you buy repeatedly, criteria you can state before the work starts and a baseline for what onboarding costs you today.
Evidence that would establish value: Onboarding a profiled supplier takes measurably less of your active time than your baseline, for a comparable service.

Service providers

Suppliers whose agents perform the work

What the port proposes: Describe a service once in a versioned profile and carry permitted evidence of accepted work to the next independent buyer.
What stays yours: Your methods, prompts, tooling and prices. You choose which evidence may be shared, and with whom.
What you would bring: A service with a clear deliverable, an integration other buyers can reuse and willingness to be evaluated against agreed criteria.
Evidence that would establish value: The second and third buyers reach a first accepted mission with less sales, security and integration effort than the first.

Agent developers

Teams that build and operate agents and agent platforms

What the port proposes: A way for an agent to be identified, and to receive a mission-specific mandate, without building a separate arrangement for each buyer.
What stays yours: Your model choices, runtime and architecture. The port is intended to be neutral across providers and clouds.
What you would bring: Execution controls that can honor a mandate’s scope, limits, expiry and revocation, and that can emit evidence events.
Evidence that would establish value: An agent built once can work for independent buyers under different mandates without custom permission logic for each.

Researchers

People who study agent economies, delegation, evidence and market design

What the port proposes: A stated hypothesis with a threshold and a refutation condition, and public briefs that separate proposals from results.
What stays yours: Your independence. APA does not present its briefs as peer-reviewed or empirical findings.
What you would bring: Scrutiny of the experiment design: comparability of the two buyers, the baseline, hidden costs and alternative explanations.
Evidence that would establish value: A result that survives a comparable baseline and a full count of human and technical costs.

Infrastructure partners

Identity, interoperability, cloud and payment networks

What the port proposes: A commercial acceptance layer that sits between independent principals and connects to existing networks.
What stays yours: Your network, your customers and your rules. The design does not include a new messaging protocol, a payment rail or custody of funds.
What you would bring: Suitable open standards and integration points for identity, agent interoperability, execution control and settlement.
Evidence that would establish value: Acceptance records that travel across your network without requiring participants to leave it.

Permission boundaries

A network that reuses information has to be exact about what may be reused. The proposed allocation follows one rule from the founding record: service profiles and permitted evidence are portable; a buyer’s permissions are not.

Record	Created by	Reusable by another buyer
ServiceProfile	The supplier	Yes, as the supplier publishes it
AgentIdentity	The agent’s operator	Yes, to identify the agent—never to authorize it
Mandate	The buyer, for one mission	Never
AcceptanceRule	The buyer, agreed with the supplier	Only if that buyer chooses to publish it as a template
MissionRecord	Buyer and supplier together	No; it belongs to the mission
EvidenceEvent	The supplier, its agent or a verifier	Only the items every affected party permits
DisputeRecord	The buyer or the supplier	No

Proposed allocation. The operating rules that would make it binding—participation terms, evidence retention, liability and disputes—have not been written.

Intended interoperability

The port is designed to connect networks that already exist. The founding record commits to reusing open standards and existing identity and payment infrastructure, and to demonstrating value before scaling.

Function	Intended source	The port’s proposed addition
Organizational identity	Existing identity and credential systems	Linking a principal to its mandates and decisions
Agent-to-agent communication	Existing open interoperability protocols	None; no new messaging protocol is proposed
Execution control	The agent’s own runtime and platform	A mandate those controls can read and honor
Payment	Existing payment rails	Settlement adapters; no custody of client funds
Commercial acceptance	Today: each buyer–supplier pair, separately	Shared profiles, evidence formats and acceptance records

No specific standards or providers have been selected. Selection belongs to the first validation window, alongside the service class and the threat model.

Is your service a candidate

The first service terminal needs one service class. Six properties make a service a strong candidate. Mark the statements that are true of a service you buy or sell.

Candidate service self-checkRuns in your browser · nothing is sent

The deliverable is digital and has a clear boundaryA defined output, a defined quantity and a deadline.
Most of the result can be checked by machineAgainst a schema, a test set, a control sample or another stated criterion.
Several independent buyers purchase the same kind of workReuse needs a second buyer with a comparable requirement.
Onboarding a new supplier is costly and repeats for each buyerSecurity review, integration, sample validation or similar effort.
Useful evidence could be shared without exposing a buyer’s dataFor example, that a mission of this class was accepted under stated criteria.
A buyer or supplier would plausibly pay to avoid the repeated workWillingness to pay is part of the test, not an assumption.

This is a reading aid. It does not register interest, store your answers or contact anyone.

Taking part

There is no intake process yet: no accounts, no forms and no waiting list. APA will open a contact channel when it can respond to enquiries properly, and will publish it on this page.

Until then, the most useful preparation is the same information the first buyer and supplier interviews will ask for:

the service you would test, stated as a bounded deliverable;
how you decide today whether that work is acceptable;
what onboarding a new supplier—or a new buyer—costs you in active time;
which evidence you could share, and which you could not.

Follow a mission through the port Read the plain answers

Independent parties One shared operating structure