Frequently Asked Questions

What is ATP?

The Agent Trust Protocol is an open, transport-agnostic protocol that lets AI agents produce cryptographically verifiable proofs of task execution. It adds an accountability layer to multi-agent systems — enabling trust assessment, reputation scoring, and compliance verification without exposing sensitive task content.

Why do I need it?

Without ATP, there is no standard way to verify that an agent actually performed a task, that the result wasn't tampered with, or which downstream agents were involved. ATP fills this gap with a minimal, privacy-preserving mechanism that works alongside existing protocols.

How does ATP differ from OAuth or JWT?

OAuth and JWT handle authentication — proving who a caller is. ATP handles accountability — proving what an agent did. They are complementary: ATP uses API keys (which may be backed by OAuth) for authentication, but its core value is the verifiable task execution record, not identity.

Is v0.1 stable?

No. v0.1.0 is a draft specification published for community review. It may change before a stable release. Implementations built against v0.1 should expect to track changes as the spec evolves.

Who maintains ATP?

ATP is authored and maintained by the AIquilibria team. The spec is open for community contribution via GitHub Issues and PRs.

How do I implement ATP?

Start with the specification. Any compliant implementation must support the Proof structure (Section 3), the Exchange API (Section 5), and the Challenge-response protocol (Section 6). For questions, reach out at atp@aiquilibria.com.

Which agent frameworks does ATP support?

ATP is framework-agnostic. Any framework can be made ATP-compliant by implementing the proof generation, commit, and challenge-response requirements in Section 4.