The Agent Briefing Standard (ABS-1)
A proposal for a universal /agents endpoint — the robots.txt for AI agents. The standard defines how platforms expose capabilities, auth, and integration examples to AI coding assistants.
Abstract
The Agent Briefing Standard (ABS-1) proposes that every AI-capable platform expose a /agents endpoint serving structured integration instructions for AI coding assistants and automation frameworks.
The standard defines three required artifacts: a human-readable HTML page, a machine-readable /agents.json capabilities document, and at least one IDE-specific instruction file (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, or equivalent). Optional: an /agents/llms.txt file following the Jeremy Howard standard.
Historical context
Every wave of web automation created a new machine-readable contract format. robots.txt (1994) told crawlers what not to index. sitemap.xml (2005) told them what to index. OpenAPI (2011) told API clients how to call services. llms.txt (2024) tells LLMs what content means.
ABS-1 is the agentic-wave contract: it tells AI agents how to USE a platform as a tool — not what the platform contains, but how to call it, what OAuth3 scopes are required, what the response shapes look like, and what the error states mean.
Specification
A conforming ABS-1 implementation MUST: (1) serve GET /agents as an HTML page with agent integration instructions; (2) serve GET /agents.json as a JSON object with at minimum the fields: name, version, description, capabilities (array), api_base, auth.type, pricing; (3) serve at least one IDE-specific format at /agents/{format}.
A conforming implementation SHOULD: (1) serve /agents/claude.md in CLAUDE.md format; (2) serve /agents/cursor in .cursorrules format; (3) serve /agents/llms.txt in llms.txt format; (4) include a hello_world field in /agents.json showing the simplest possible working API call sequence.
Reference implementation
The Solace AGI reference implementation is live at solaceagi.com/agents. The /agents.json response documents the Solace Browser API (navigate, click, fill, screenshot, evaluate) with OAuth3 scope requirements and pricing. Four IDE formats are available for download.
The standard is open for community adoption. Platforms that implement ABS-1 are encouraged to add an Agent-Ready badge and link to their /agents endpoint from their homepage.