XSI-AIMS — Agent Instrumentation and Management Specification

The open standard for instrumenting, managing, and governing agentic systems.

Substrate-agnostic  ·  Model-agnostic  ·  Deployment-agnostic

Spec license CC BY 4.0 Code MIT Status v2.1.0 public review draft Conformance FULL PARTIAL OBSERVER
Read the Specification View on GitHub Key Concepts

What is XSI-AIMS

XSI-AIMS specifies horizontal supervisory-agent governance — a framework for the safe deployment of agents that monitor and manage other agents on behalf of a system's principals. It defines the contracts an agentic system must meet — registration, communication, audit, lifecycle, supervision, and conformance — without prescribing the implementing technology. It is implementation-neutral by construction: a sovereign-cloud orchestrator, an on-premises deployment, and a regulator's reference platform can all claim conformance against the same text.

Key concepts

The Three Principles
The Three Principles — Generative / Constraining / Integrative
Stacked architecture
Four operational layers × three functional modes
Ten archetypes
The ten-archetype taxonomy
Trust gradient
The Trust Gradient (L1–L5)

Conformance

FULL

The entire topology and safety substrate.

PARTIAL

Core management components plus the AIP wire format and IAME envelope.

OBSERVER

Consumes AIP and IAME read-only.

Implementations declare their level in the AIP handshake and in public documentation. Conformance is full or none at the level claimed. See the specification and the figure set.

Standards alignment

The normative surface references cross-industry foundations wherever one exists — OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the IEEE 7000-series, the EU AI Act, and FIPS 203/204/205.