Network Working Group M. Jernalczyk Internet-Draft IntentWeb Intended status: Experimental 6 July 2026 Expires: 7 January 2027 IntentWeb AgentManifest draft-jernalczyk-intentweb-agent-manifest-00 Abstract AgentManifest defines a JSON document that websites can publish to describe identity, trusted knowledge, agent-facing capabilities, structured bindings, risk levels, consent requirements, authentication expectations, audit rules, and policies. The goal is to help AI agents understand what a website knows and what it can safely do before scraping, guessing from visual UI, or executing brittle browser automation. Note to Readers This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC. This document is an experimental individual Internet-Draft proposal for discussion. It is not an RFC and is not an IETF-approved standard. Source material for this draft is maintained in the AgentManifest repository. The draft is expected to change based on implementation feedback and standards discussion. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on 7 January 2027. Jernalczyk Expires 7 January 2027 [Page 1] Internet-Draft AgentManifest July 2026 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/ license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3. Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 5. Risk and Consent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 7. Privacy Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 9. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 10. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1. Introduction AgentManifest is an experimental open specification. Implementers are encouraged to test the draft, report interoperability issues, and propose improvements. The key words MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY, and OPTIONAL in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119] and [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here. 2. Overview An AgentManifest document declares: * the manifest version and status, * the website or organization identity, * the platform and integration mode, Jernalczyk Expires 7 January 2027 [Page 2] Internet-Draft AgentManifest July 2026 * discovery locations for the manifest and related resources, * trusted knowledge sources, * capabilities with type, risk, consent, state-change, binding, and audit metadata, and * policy expectations for consent, authentication, data minimization, and audit. Capabilities describe what a website can do and under which policy. Structured bindings describe how that capability can be accessed or executed, such as through HTML, static resources, HTTP, OpenAPI , MCP , or hosted checkout. OpenAPI operations and MCP tools are binding targets, not the whole capability contract. AgentManifest is vendor-neutral. Implementation frameworks can generate manifests and bindings, but the manifest does not require any specific generator or expose implementation ownership as a normative field. 3. Discovery Agents SHOULD attempt static discovery at /.well-known/agent.json. Publishers MAY also expose /.well-known/agent-manifest.json, /agent- manifest.json, or an HTML discovery hint: If no manifest is found, agents SHOULD continue normal web behavior and SHOULD NOT infer that unsupported actions are safe. 4. Schema The canonical JSON Schema for the repository version of this draft is: rfc/schemas/agent-manifest.v0.1.schema.json The schema uses JSON Schema Draft 2020-12 and keeps additionalProperties: true for forward-compatible experimentation. A conforming manifest for this draft uses the agentManifestVersion value 0.1-draft. Jernalczyk Expires 7 January 2027 [Page 3] Internet-Draft AgentManifest July 2026 5. Risk and Consent Capabilities declare a risk level of low, medium, high, or critical. Low-risk capabilities are public and read-only. Medium-risk capabilities submit data or start a workflow. High-risk capabilities modify user or business state. Critical capabilities include payments, orders, legal commitments, destructive actions, or irreversible operations. High and critical actions MUST require explicit confirmation and audit. Critical actions MUST set stateChange to true, requiresConsent to true, and consentMode to explicit, step_up, or human_review. AgentManifest declares authentication, authorization, consent, audit, and policy expectations. Protocol endpoints are responsible for enforcement. Consent must be specific to a capability invocation and must not be treated as broad permanent authorization. Critical actions should use appropriate authentication, explicit confirmation, audit, replay protection, and duplicate transaction controls. 6. Security Considerations Manifests and related public files MUST NOT expose secrets, private tokens, unpublished data, private customer information, admin-only endpoints, or privileged internal operations. Servers MUST enforce authorization, consent, validation, replay protection, duplicate transaction controls, and policy checks outside prompt text. Prompt instructions are not a security boundary. 7. Privacy Considerations Publishers should minimize disclosed and collected data. Knowledge sources should include only information intended for public agent use. State-changing actions should collect only fields required for the declared capability. Agents should provide user-visible summaries for submitted data and should avoid logging sensitive user information unless required for audit, compliance, or fraud prevention. 8. IANA Considerations This document makes no IANA registration request. Jernalczyk Expires 7 January 2027 [Page 4] Internet-Draft AgentManifest July 2026 The media type application/agent-manifest+json is proposed for discussion only and is not registered by this document. 9. Normative References [JSON-SCHEMA-2020-12] JSON Schema, "JSON Schema: A Media Type for Describing JSON Documents", June 2022, . [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, . [RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017, . 10. Informative References [MCP] Model Context Protocol, "Model Context Protocol", . [OPENAPI] OpenAPI Initiative, "OpenAPI Specification", . Author's Address Mariusz Jernalczyk IntentWeb Jernalczyk Expires 7 January 2027 [Page 5]