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Agent as a BusinessAgent as a Business Documentation

Core Concepts

Agent as a Business is the commercial and operational layer around an AI capability. It packages the capability once, publishes it across human and agent channels, meters usage, and connects reliability with revenue and margin.

Agent Business

Section titled “Agent Business”

An Agent Business is the enduring identity of a sellable capability. Its name and history continue across many Capability Releases, Offers, channels, and operational events.

Capability

Section titled “Capability”

The Capability defines what the business does and the contract it exposes. A prompt, workflow, or external agent engine can provide the implementation, but the implementation source is not the business itself.

Surface

Section titled “Surface”

A Surface is how a buyer or client reaches the capability: hosted Web, runtime API, OpenAPI, MCP, or a downloadable package. Human and machine surfaces can share one Agent Business and release history.

Capability Release

Section titled “Capability Release”

A Capability Release is an immutable executable and trust contract. It binds a specific capability version, schemas, runtime policy, and referenced commercial identities. Changed behavior should produce a new release instead of mutating a live one.

Offer and settlement policy

Section titled “Offer and settlement policy”

An Offer records buyer-facing price, quota, payment, and refund terms. A Settlement Policy records how value is allocated between the creator, platform, and channel. Both remain explicit so historical transactions can be explained later.

Channel and publication

Section titled “Channel and publication”

A Channel is a managed destination such as hosted Web, direct API, MCP, or an external registry. A Publication records the relationship between an Agent Business, a channel, and the release and commercial terms projected there.

Operations

Section titled “Operations”

Operations covers reliability, usage, revenue, cost, margin, refunds, and audit evidence. Operational views report verified events and make unavailable or empty data explicit.

Runtime and consumers

Section titled “Runtime and consumers”

The runtime is the business-scoped execution surface used by generated frontends, direct API clients, and agents. It enforces tokens, origin policy, quotas, payment gates, provider execution, and telemetry without exposing secrets to the client.

The downstream consumer may be a human end user, an API client, or another agent. Consumer identity, quota, and credits remain scoped to the Agent Business and separate from creator login and billing.

API compatibility

Section titled “API compatibility”

Some runtime paths, schemas, headers, and resource identifiers retain legacy wire names for compatibility. Treat those values as protocol identifiers. In the console and product documentation, the canonical product entity is Agent Business.

Continue

Section titled “Continue”