🧩 Agent Cards

A Documentation Standard for Operational AI Agents

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🧠 Overview

Agent Cards provide a lightweight, structured standard for documenting AI agents — covering their behavioral attributes, memory design, tool integrations, communication protocols, and governance metadata.

This work extends the model-centric transparency artifacts (Model Cards, FactSheets) into the agentic AI era, supporting reproducibility, comparability, and governance of autonomous and multi-agent systems.

📘 Accepted at: MICAI 2025 Workshops
📚 Series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI)
🏢 Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Table 1 Proposed Agent Card Template

Section	Description
Agent version	Semantic version of the agent release (e.g., 1.2).
Agent Name	Identifier of the agent.
Agent Role(s)	Planner, Executor, Critic, Orchestrator (list specific roles).
Inputs	Text files, APIs, structured and unstructured data.
Outputs	API responses or text.
Memory	Short-term: current turn/context window profile; Long-term.
Tools/Functions	Capabilities the agent can invoke beyond its core LLM, such as calculators, retrieval modules, external APIs, internal spreadsheets, or domain-specific tools. Document the type of tool, its intended purpose, and how it extends the agent’s abilities.
Communication	Human interface (chat/UI); agent-to-agent protocols; message schemas/versions; handoff/approval policies.
Monitoring	Logged metrics (latency, token usage, error rate); trace IDs; inference profile/feature flags; SLOs and alert routes.
Governance	Safety filters/guardrails; PII/PHI handling; data retention and access control; approvals and audit checkpoints.
Versioning	Release tag/date; prompt hash; toolchain/SBOM; external dependency versions; overall reproducibility hash.
Known Limitations	Current scope boundaries; partial automation notes; known brittleness or non-determinism sources (e.g., upstream API variability).
Evaluation	Benchmarks/KPIs (e.g., RAG quality, long-context stress); calibration/abstention policy; evaluation datasets/snapshots; last run date and results.

YAML for LLM

agent cards for ai agent
agentcard: 1.0
meta:
  name: TaxBot
  version: 0.7.3
  owner: Tax Operations — Data/AI
  last_updated: 2025-10-10
purpose:
  objective: "Assist with personal and business tax queries, document intake, and filing prep with traceable, policy‑compliant outputs"
  users: [Tax Analyst, Accountant, Taxpayer]
interface:
  inputs: [question, PDF, XML, XLSX]
  outputs: [answer, citation_list, filing_checklist, action_proposal]
tools:
  - name: tax_rules_db
    scope: read-only
    eligibility: requires jurisdiction and tax_year
  - name: parse_tax_pdf
    leakage_guard: no final filing decisions
  - name: sat_portal_client
    scope: read-only
    eligibility: authenticated user session
autonomy:
  allowed_actions: [draft_client_email, create_case_ticket]
  requires_approval_for: [submit_return, modify_client_profile]
memory:
  persistent: session_summaries (TTL: 30d)
  pii: masked_at_ingest; encryption_at_rest: AES256
policies:
  deference_gate: gamma=-3.0 until verify+readiness>=tau
  prohibited_content: [store raw IDs, off‑policy advice]
evaluation:
  kpis: {first_response_time_p50: "<30s", hallucination_rate: "<1%", citation_coverage: ">=95%"}
  red_team: [prompt_injection, refund_scam, identity_theft_vector]
ops:
  envs: [dev, staging, prod]
  logging: structured_traces to s3://agent-logs
  rollback: blue/green with canaries
risks:
  - name: pii_leakage
    mitigation: strict scopes + PII scrubbing + DLP scanners

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⚙️ Installation

pip install agentcard

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🚀 Quick Start

from agentcard import AgentCard

card = AgentCard.from_yaml("example.yaml")
print(card.name)  # TaxAdvisorBot

card.register_to_phoenix()

Output

Registered agent agent-001 with Phoenix observability.

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📖 Citation

If you use Agent Cards in your research, please cite:

Urteaga-Reyesvera, J. C., & Lopez Murphy, J. J. (2025).
Agent Cards: A Documentation Standard for Operational AI Agents.
In MICAI 2025 Workshops (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence).
Springer Nature Switzerland AG. (Forthcoming)
https://github.com/CarlosUrteaga/AgentCard

BibTeX

@inproceedings{urteaga2025agentcards,
  author    = {Urteaga-Reyesvera, J. Carlos and Lopez Murphy, Juan Jose},
  title     = {Agent Cards: A Documentation Standard for Operational AI Agents},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the MICAI 2025 Workshops},
  series    = {Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence},
  publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland AG},
  note      = {Forthcoming},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://github.com/CarlosUrteaga/AgentCard}
}