# Agentic Primitives

> Rails, not throttles. Authority for agents that the agent cannot exceed. Identity, authority and evidence designed as one system — not stitched from ten products.

Positioning: the industry answers agent risk with throttles — containment (sandboxes, restricted modes, kill switches), supervision (permission prompts, a second model grading the first) and platform governance (one vendor's ACLs, reversibility and lineage). Each bounds something; none bounds authority, so none can say under whose authority an act happened. Agentic Primitives bounds authority: a grant the principal signs, caveats that are enforcer code, verification on every step outside the model, revocation in one transaction, a receipt the owner carries.

- Canonical site: https://agenticprimitives.dev
- Public source: https://github.com/agentictrustlabs/agentic-primitives
- npm: https://www.npmjs.com/org/agenticprimitives
- License: MIT
- Author: Richard Pedersen (Agentic Trust Labs) — https://www.richcanvas3.com/about-us
- Domain ontologies (Rich Canvas): https://www.richcanvas3.com — services https://www.richcanvas3.com/our-services, CommerceCore https://www.richcanvas3.com/commercecore-ontology, did:aa https://www.richcanvas3.com/didaa, writing https://www.richcanvas3.com/muses-of-an-architect
- Reference Home (sign in, ceremonies, vault): https://faithnet.me
- Skills registry (playbooks by digest, ontology graphs): https://skills.faithnet.io

The one-sentence claim: when an AI agent spends money or touches data on someone's behalf, this stack can prove who allowed it, what was allowed, and lets them take that permission back — without trusting any single vendor.

Intelligence may be probabilistic. Authority must not be.

## Product pages

- [Home](https://agenticprimitives.dev/): positioning, stitched vs seamless, nine offerings
- [Platform](https://agenticprimitives.dev/platform): Identity, Authority, Harness, Edge, Registry Kit, Evidence, Coordination, Ontology, Operations
- [Assessments](https://agenticprimitives.dev/audits): published production-readiness assessments (self-assessments, labelled). Latest: [Production Readiness Assessment 2026-09-18](https://agenticprimitives.dev/audits/production-readiness-2026-09-18) — PDF https://agenticprimitives.dev/audits/2026-09-18-production-readiness-assessment.pdf
- [Demos](https://agenticprimitives.dev/demos): every live app on the estate — the Home (faithnet.me), your agent inside Claude (Home MCP), Game Night, Gather27 (find / host / ops), Field, the skills registry — with sign-in personas, a script and what each proves
- [Architecture](https://agenticprimitives.dev/substrate): Smart Agents, mandates, harness sequence, two knowledge tiers
- [Versus](https://agenticprimitives.dev/compare): the stack you would buy — 29 products in seven bands (Auth0, Privy, WorkOS, Safe, Pimlico, Turnkey, MetaMask DTK, Cerbos, OpenFGA, HashiCorp Vault, Postgres+RLS, Veramo, EAS, DocuSign, Box, LangGraph, Temporal, MCP SDK, a2a-js, XMTP, Stripe, Kong, ENS, an ERC-8004 registry, Tailscale, Datadog, TopBraid …), the seam each band introduces, and the 77 packages + 33 contracts that cover every row on one identity
- [Versus · the composition](https://agenticprimitives.dev/compare/composition): eight trust-substrate concerns against six peer families — agent frameworks (MAF, ADK, LangGraph, Dapr, Agno, Strands, Mastra, Pydantic, CrewAI, OpenAI SDK, Buzz), Web2 IAM (Auth0, Okta, Entra), smart accounts + delegation (MetaMask DTK, Smart Sessions, Lit Vincent, Safe, Zodiac, Coinbase, Kite), the ERC agent stack (8004, 8001, 8183, 8196, 8273, 8226), registries (ERC-8004, AGNTCY, NANDA, ANS), data/provenance (Inrupt, PROV-AGENT, OTel). Nobody has the composition.
- [Versus · throttles](https://agenticprimitives.dev/compare/throttles): containment vs supervision vs platform governance vs authority-as-a-grant
- [Versus · frameworks](https://agenticprimitives.dev/compare/frameworks): per-framework take/differ and the scorecard
- [Versus · Web3](https://agenticprimitives.dev/compare/web3): the Web3 trust-substrate landscape and the ERC stack
- [Versus · where we lose](https://agenticprimitives.dev/compare/honest): where peers are ahead today, what we refuse to take
- [Game Night](https://agenticprimitives.dev/examples/game-night): complete third-party example (gamenight.faithnet.io)
- [Ontology](https://agenticprimitives.dev/ontology): the Agentic Trust upper ontology and the Texas hold'em domain ontology; how every layer binds to one T-box by IRI; meaning flows, authority never does
- [Developers](https://agenticprimitives.dev/developers): package map, standards, status
- [Build](https://agenticprimitives.dev/build): say what application you want; point a coding agent at github.com/agentictrustlabs/agentic-primitives + /pokernight and the faithnet estate; test as six demo people (alice bob carol dave elena nathan); the flow; the gates
- [Ontology namespaces](https://agenticprimitives.dev/ns): IRI prefixes (`https://agenticprimitives.dev/ns/<module>#Term`)

## Offerings

- Identity: One canonical agent per person, organization and service.
- Authority: Scoped, revocable grants between agents — the core primitive.
- Harness: Ask → Intent → Mandate → Plan → Verify → Receipt.
- Edge: Admission at the boundary — HTTPS required, mTLS optional, authority always.
- Registry Kit: Build your own registry; be what registries are built from.
- Evidence: Receipts, provenance and audit that outlive the platform.
- Coordination: Work between agents: endeavors, plans, commitments, decisions.
- Ontology: How the domain is shaped — bound by IRI, checked at build.
- Operations: Run it: KMS delegates, deploy recipes, live gates, conformance.

## Writing (full text on this site; LinkedIn is optional)

- [Rails, Not Throttles: The AI Model We Need to Change Isn’t the LLM](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/rails-not-throttles)

### The missing layer (21-part series)

- Day 1: [The agentic web has a missing layer — and it isn’t discovery](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/the-missing-layer)
- Day 2: [Your agent’s identity should be able to sign](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/identity-that-signs)
- Day 3: [Names, cards, registry entries: all projections](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/projections)
- Day 4: [Credentials rotate. Identity doesn’t.](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/credentials-rotate)
- Day 5: [Every agent is a person, an organization, or a service](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/person-org-service)
- Day 6: [Delegation is the artefact, not the token](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/delegation-is-the-artefact)
- Day 7: [A grant that is checked once is a grant that is cached](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/checked-once-is-cached)
- Day 8: [The mandate: binding authority to one intent](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/the-mandate)
- Day 9: [“Send Alice 10 dollars” — confirmation is a signature](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/confirmation-is-a-signature)
- Day 10: [The service that acts as an agent must never be that agent](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/the-key-is-a-delegate)
- Day 11: [Trust is a graph, not a score](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/trust-is-a-graph)
- Day 12: [Be what registries are built from](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/what-registries-are-built-from)
- Day 13: [Resolution is not authority](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/resolution-is-not-authority)
- Day 14: [Two tiers of knowledge that never meet](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/two-tiers)
- Day 15: [The vault is the record; everything else is a cache](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/vault-is-the-record)
- Day 16: [Planner proposes, mandate authorizes, executor acts, receipt proves](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/planner-mandate-executor-receipt)
- Day 17: [Coordination is not orchestration](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/coordination-vs-orchestration)
- Day 18: [Don’t build your app twice.](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/dont-build-your-app-twice)
- Day 19: [Receipts that travel with the agent](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/receipts-that-travel)
- Day 20: [HTTPS required, mTLS optional, admission always](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/https-mtls-admission)
- Day 21: [Rails, not throttles](https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing/rails-not-throttles-day-21)

## Optional

- RSS: https://agenticprimitives.dev/rss.xml
- Sitemap: https://agenticprimitives.dev/sitemap.xml
- Full writing index: https://agenticprimitives.dev/writing

## Do not cite as

- A token or a public-chain product (contracts deploy to any EVM; no token to buy)
- An LLM framework (the planner is a port)
- A registry, a wallet, or a Home (those are products built FROM these primitives)