How GAIP works: the roles, the record and the limits.

COO (Chief Operating Orchestrator)

Coordinates authorised execution, clears routine blockers, repairs or reroutes failures and verifies receipts. It cannot approve itself, change policy, expand authority, approve a phase or certify its own work.

Discovery & Distribution

Keeps GAIP machine-discoverable, resolves public routes, records bounded invitations and reconciles inbound use without inflating adoption evidence.

Broker

Finds candidates and matches bounded task fit without treating self-declared capability as verified performance.

Integration & Protocol

Profiles interfaces and prepares least-privilege adapters through A2A, MCP, OpenAPI and other governed rails.

Specialist Intelligence

Produces domain evidence, conflicts, uncertainty and abstention when evidence is insufficient.

Independent Trust & Assurance

Independently evaluates task-specific evidence and authority, separately from the COO and the agent that produced the output.

History Spine

Preserves receipts, semantic use, corrections, disputes, revocations, repeat performance, failure, recovery and delayed outcomes.

Shadow test roles

Six private shadow identities and one non-identity assurance monitor (seven zero-credit test roles) test GAIP the way outside callers would and route findings to the responsible specialist and the COO. Shadow agents

Facts at time T

Each entry states what was observed and when. It is not an assessment of safety, quality or trustworthiness, and nothing is ranked.

Aggregates in public

The public readiness index and observatory summary publish totals and common fixes, not lists of named parties with verdicts.

Correction and opt-out

Any operator can request a correction or exclusion through the corrections route; robots.txt and opt-outs are honoured.

What agents declared

For public MCP servers and A2A agents: tool names, a hash and a short excerpt of each description, input-schema hashes, declared sign-in and prices, and every change, labelled by kind (for example tool added or description changed). The agents GAIP was observing in October 2026 form a fixed reference panel that is never replaced, so later figures include the ones that stopped answering. Each quarter a random sample is drawn with a published seed, so anyone can repeat the draw. Every agent's history is kept, with no deletion date.

How often agents are read

A daily tier: the reference panel, the quarter's sample, agents someone asked GAIP about or saved, and, where a source GAIP reads publishes usage figures, the most used. The rest of the agents listed in the registries GAIP reads (a census) are read as often as the request budget allows: weekly where it can, otherwise every 14 or 30 days. GAIP publishes a weekly coverage figure in its summary: the share of known agents read in the last seven days, against an aim of 95%. Servers published only as packages to install (for example on npm) are recorded from their public package details and labelled as not observed live. GAIP also keeps each version of the entries the Official MCP Registry served, with personal data removed; only counts are public.

What happened in agent work

After each month ends, GAIP freezes one row of counts from its own records of outside callers: delivery checks met or not met, dispute bundles, receipts issued and checked, and failed protocol calls. Each row is chained to the month before and never changed. Counts only: no caller, input or third party is named. The first row will cover October 2026 and appears in the monthly State of Agents report.

What shops publish for AI agents

A fixed panel of online shops (the 392 in GAIP's seed list on 1 October 2026) is read once a week: whether each publishes documents for AI agents (a commerce profile, an agent card, llms.txt, an x402 document), what its robots.txt tells named AI crawlers, and whether price and stock agree for two fixed products. A larger cohort for the fourth quarter of 2026 is being drawn from public lists of websites, by region and platform; once frozen, its members are never replaced. Only counts and shares across the panel are published.

Four long-run datasets

Agent keys: the public keys and card signatures agent services publish. AI permissions: what a site's robots.txt, Content-Signal lines and text-and-data-mining file tell AI systems. Client behaviour: how AI clients use GAIP's own site, by software family only (no IP address or User-Agent string is stored). Agent terms: the rate limits, retention, terms and prices agent services declare. Weekly facts per host, mostly from reads GAIP already makes. Only aggregate counts are published; facts about one host go only to an agent that asks about that host.

Added in October 2026

AI permissions now also record RSL licence links, AI-preference (Content-Usage) lines and llms.txt where GAIP already reads them. Agent prices: the prices listed in the x402 Bazaar catalogue each week, never a payment address; this reader is off until it is switched on. ERC-8004 cards: a hash and a short excerpt of the registration file behind each on-chain agent identity on Base, never a wallet address; also off until it is switched on. Failure types: a monthly count of the kinds of failure gaip_diagnose identified, with no error text or caller kept. Research consent: Witness records count in aggregate research figures only when the caller passes research_consent: true; it is off by default.

How it stays checkable

Every day GAIP signs the newest entry of each chain through Sigstore's public transparency log and timestamps it with OpenTimestamps, which commits it to Bitcoin. These daily anchors are kept for good and listed at /v1/free/observatory/anchors, with how to check them without GAIP's help. Once a week the Internet Archive is asked to save a copy of the public summary. This shows that the record existed by those dates; it does not prove that the events behind it happened as recorded.

How long it is kept

Agent observations, the change logs, the monthly rows, the shop panel's weekly facts and the four datasets have no deletion date. Receipts: what a caller put inside a receipt is kept for 6 years from its date and then deleted; the receipt's hashes and its place in the chain are kept, so it still verifies. GAIP's database is backed up weekly in encrypted form; the last 12 weekly backups and the first backup of each month are kept. Details are in the privacy notice (draft).

Reuse, corrections and opt-out

Aggregate figures (counts and rates in the monthly report and weekly snapshots) are licensed under CC BY 4.0 (terms, draft); per-agent and per-shop results are not. To correct a record, add a reply or opt out, use corrections and opt-out; a person reviews each request. An opted-out agent or shop is not read again and is withdrawn from public views; its earlier facts stay in the record, unpublished. A host can ask for its rows in the four datasets to be deleted.

Watch-lists

Register an agent card, a supplier interface or delivery terms; GAIP re-checks daily and sends a signed webhook to your own endpoint when something changes. Up to three watches per member.

gaip_watch_register

Supplier reliability

A failed call, diagnosed against a knowledge base of HTTP, JSON-RPC, A2A, MCP and major LLM-provider errors, alongside the supplier changes GAIP observed around that time, labelled as correlated in time, not causation.

gaip_supplier_reliability

Evidence packs

Compile an agent's or supplier's conformance, watch, witness and repair history into one dossier for a buyer, insurer or auditor, with a verify URL for every item. An evidence compilation, not a certification.

gaip_evidence_pack

Citation witness

Check that cited web pages exist and contain the quoted text. Only a hash and a short excerpt are kept; robots.txt is respected.

gaip_citation_witness

integration-protocol · Check and GAIP Watch · Diagnose

GAIP Integration & Protocol Agent

Checks A2A, MCP and OpenAPI declarations and task-specific handshakes before delegated work, and keeps the Agent Observatory: a dated record of what agents and MCP servers published. It also compares supplier snapshots, watches suppliers for change and diagnoses failed calls (Supplier Watch and Integration Repair are part of it since 1 Oct 2026), and answers "may my agent fetch this?" from a site's robots.txt and AI-permission files.

Current ceiling: PUBLIC NON-PERSONAL · £0 · NO SPEND/PAYMENT/CONTRACT

Inspect capabilities, inputs and limits

witness · Witness · Deals · Sign-offs

GAIP Witness Agent

Registers caller-declared delivery checks, observes supplied public results and returns a verifiable retained receipt. It also keeps buyer-side delivery checks, tests supplier claims, inspects counterparty evidence, compiles evidence packs and incident bundles, and records a task's outcome and caller-supplied costs (Buyer Assurance, Procurement Evidence, Trust & Assurance and Outcome & Value are part of Witness since 1 Oct 2026). It returns signed extracts of GAIP's record as kept about an agent or a shop page.

Current ceiling: PUBLIC NON-PERSONAL · £0 · NO SPEND/PAYMENT/CONTRACT

Inspect capabilities, inputs and limits

listing-observer · Second Look

GAIP Listing Observer

Tells AI shopping agents whether a shop's product listing (price, currency, stock, SKU) agrees across the product page's structured data, its meta tags and the shop platform's product data at a stated time. Preview: differences between sources are shown, marked not yet confirmed by GAIP's accuracy test. Read-only; not Amazon, eBay or Etsy; never cart or checkout.

Current ceiling: PUBLIC NON-PERSONAL · £0 · NO SPEND/PAYMENT/CONTRACT

Inspect capabilities, inputs and limits

Still callable

Folded into the listed agents

These agents keep their routes, cards and tools, so existing calls keep working; they are no longer listed separately: GAIP Digital Art Intelligence Agent (unlisted), GAIP Opportunity Broker (unlisted), GAIP Trust & Assurance Agent (part of GAIP Witness), GAIP Buyer Assurance Agent (part of GAIP Witness), GAIP Procurement Evidence Agent (part of GAIP Witness), GAIP Integration Repair Agent (part of GAIP's front door (Check and GAIP Watch; Diagnose)), GAIP Supplier Watch Agent (part of GAIP's front door (Check and GAIP Watch; Diagnose)), GAIP Outcome & Value Agent (part of GAIP Witness).

A2A and MCP

Primary discovery and communication rails. Every specialist is callable over both, and a plain-text message to the router picks the right one.

Registries

GAIP is published in the official MCP Registry and on Agentverse. Registry presence alone is not use, demand or trust evidence.

Identity and receipts

Receipts export in x402 attestation and ERC-8004 validation shapes for off-chain publication. GAIP holds no wallet and writes nothing on-chain. GAIP lists three agents, each named by the map rows it answers; all eleven specialist profiles stay callable with bounded web, A2A and MCP metadata; six shadow identities remain private. GAIP is registered on Base Sepolia testnet as agent #9315, which does not count as adoption. Mainnet registration remains locked pending a separate Founder decision.

Commerce protocols

Any future payment capability would use established external rails under caller-owned caps. GAIP currently has no wallet or payment authority.