The Missing Layer for Autonomous Agents: Introducing the Autonomous Company Interface (ACI)

A developer introduced the Autonomous Company Interface (ACI), an open specification that lets organizations describe themselves in a machine-readable format for autonomous agents. ACI defines five manifest types—Identity, Capability, Knowledge, Trust, and Agent—to provide agents with organizational context, replacing the need for scraping or inference. The specification includes three conformance levels, with Level 1 requiring only an identity manifest, capabilities manifest, and an /llms.txt file.

An AI agent can call thousands of APIs. It can write code, query databases, and invoke language models. But there's one thing it cannot do reliably: Determine what an organization is, what it offers, and how it should be trusted — without scraping, inference, or bespoke integration. When an agent reaches a company website, it sees pages designed primarily for humans — not a stable organizational contract. It can scrape text and make inferences, but it cannot reliably distinguish between a product, a pricing tier, a support contact, or a certification. It cannot reliably determine what identity claims, attestations, certifications, and supporting evidence the organization publishes, what APIs it exposes, or even which of its AI indexing tools are meant for autonomous consumption versus human reading. We built an entire web for humans — semantic markup, structured data, accessibility standards. But we left autonomous agents to fend for themselves. OpenAPI is excellent. It describes HTTP APIs with precision. But it describes interfaces , not organizations . An API definition tells you how to call an endpoint. It does not tell you: An agent trying to decide whether to interact with a company needs organizational context first, API details second. That's the gap ACI fills. ACI Autonomous Company Interface is an open specification that lets organizations describe themselves in a machine-readable format designed for autonomous agents. The core model is five manifest types: | Manifest | Purpose | |---|---| Identity | Who the organization is: name, jurisdiction, identifiers, contact | Capability | What the organization offers: products, services, documentation | Knowledge | What the organization knows: domain concepts and relationships | Trust | How organizational claims are supported: assertions, certifications, attestations, and evidence | Agent | How autonomous agents can interact: endpoints, authentication requirements, and capabilities | In the reference implementation, each manifest is a linked JSON document. An agent discovers the first one — typically via /llms.txt — and follows links to the rest. Consider a fictional company called NovaDynamics . At https://novadynamics.example/llms.txt , an agent finds: AI manifests - Identity Manifest https://novadynamics.example/identity.json - Capability Manifest https://novadynamics.example/capabilities.json - Knowledge Manifest https://novadynamics.example/knowledge.json - Trust Manifest https://novadynamics.example/trust.json - Agent Manifest https://novadynamics.example/agents.json Fetching the identity manifest reveals: { "manifest version": "0.9.0", "last updated": "2026-07-19T00:00:00Z", "publisher": "NovaDynamics Inc.", "jurisdiction": "US-DE", "website": "https://novadynamics.example", "description": "Autonomous infrastructure operations platform", "identifiers": { "id": "org.novadynamics", "type": "domain", "value": "novadynamics.example" } , "discovery": { "llms-txt": "https://novadynamics.example/llms.txt", "capability-manifest": "https://novadynamics.example/capabilities.json", "knowledge-manifest": "https://novadynamics.example/knowledge.json", "trust-manifest": "https://novadynamics.example/trust.json", "agent-manifest": "https://novadynamics.example/agents.json" } } The agent now has a stable identity anchor and machine-readable paths to NovaDynamics' capabilities, knowledge, trust assertions, and exposed agents. It can build an organizational profile from published contracts rather than site-specific scraping. ACI defines three incremental conformance levels: A pre-conformance starter — publishing only an identity manifest and /llms.txt — is a useful first step, but is not a formal conformance level. Level 1 takes about five minutes to implement. Create an identity.json , a capabilities.json , and an /llms.txt that links to them. Done. The fastest path — fork the template: GitHub: narko4u/aci-pages-template https://github.com/narko4u/aci-pages-template This GitHub Pages template includes everything you need: identity.json , capabilities.json , /llms.txt , and a landing page. Replace the placeholders with your organization's details, enable Pages, and you're live. No build tools required. Or, do it manually: identity.json with your organization name, website, identifiers, and a short description capabilities.json listing your products or services /llms.txt pointing to both manifests python3 validator/validate.py https://yourdomain.com See a live example: Zero-dependency explorer — discover what Empire Labs exposes python3 demo/aci-explorer.py empirelabs.com.au Once ACI is adopted broadly, an autonomous agent can: This is the missing layer for autonomous commerce, supply chain automation, compliance checking, and agent-to-agent coordination at scale. ACI is published as an open draft specification under CC BY 4.0. The validator, schemas, and examples are MIT-licensed. Empire Labs serves as the initial steward. The governance documents define a path to transfer ACI to a neutral foundation or standards body after v1.0 and the published independence criteria are met. The repository is at: https://github.com/narko4u/aci-spec https://github.com/narko4u/aci-spec The specification, validator, and full examples are available now. ACI is currently in Draft v0.9. The path to v1.0 requires three independent implementations, community feedback, and a stable core. We are not declaring a finished standard — we are proposing one, and inviting the community to shape it. Empire Labs Pty Ltd is the initial steward of the ACI draft specification. Next: Fork the ACI Pages Template https://github.com/narko4u/aci-pages-template , replace the placeholders, deploy it through GitHub Pages, validate the result, and submit your implementation to the Independent Implementation Tracker https://github.com/narko4u/aci-spec/issues/6 . Help us reach three independent implementations for ACI v1.0.