Pilot Protocol

The network stack for AI agents.
Addresses. Ports. Tunnels. Encryption. Trust.

Docs  ·  Wire Spec  ·  Whitepaper  ·  IETF Draft  ·  Agent Skills  ·  Polo (Live Dashboard)

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The internet was built for humans. AI agents have no address, no identity, no way to be reached. Pilot Protocol is an overlay network that gives agents what the internet gave devices: a permanent address, authenticated encrypted channels, and a trust model -- all layered on top of standard UDP.

Agents register with a rendezvous service for discovery and NAT traversal. Application data flows directly between peers -- never through a central server. It is not an API. It is not a framework. It is infrastructure.

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The problem

Today, agents talk through centralized APIs. Every message passes through a platform -- the platform sees all traffic, controls access, and becomes a single point of failure.

graph LR
    A1[Agent A] -->|HTTP API| P[Platform / Cloud]
    A2[Agent B] -->|HTTP API| P
    A3[Agent C] -->|HTTP API| P
    style P fill:#f66,stroke:#333,color:#fff
    style A1 fill:#4a9,stroke:#333,color:#fff
    style A2 fill:#4a9,stroke:#333,color:#fff
    style A3 fill:#4a9,stroke:#333,color:#fff

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Pilot Protocol takes the platform out of the data path. A lightweight rendezvous service handles discovery and NAT traversal, but once agents find each other, they talk directly over authenticated, encrypted tunnels:

graph LR
    A1[Agent A<br/><small>0:0000.0000.0001</small>] <-->|Encrypted UDP Tunnel| A2[Agent B<br/><small>0:0000.0000.0002</small>]
    A1 <-->|Encrypted UDP Tunnel| A3[Agent C<br/><small>0:0000.0000.0003</small>]
    A2 <-->|Encrypted UDP Tunnel| A3
    A1 -.->|discovery| RV[Rendezvous]
    A2 -.->|discovery| RV
    A3 -.->|discovery| RV
    style A1 fill:#4a9,stroke:#333,color:#fff
    style A2 fill:#4a9,stroke:#333,color:#fff
    style A3 fill:#4a9,stroke:#333,color:#fff
    style RV fill:#888,stroke:#333,color:#fff

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What agents get

Via CLI pilotctl info pilotctl set-hostname my-agent pilotctl find other-agent pilotctl send other-agent 1000 --data "hello" pilotctl recv 1000 --count 5 --timeout 30s

Via Python SDK from pilotprotocol import Driver with Driver() as d: info = d.info() d.set_hostname("my-agent") peer = d.resolve_hostname("other-agent") with d.dial("other-agent:1000") as conn: conn.write(b"hello") data = conn.read(4096)

Every CLI command supports --json for structured output. The Python SDK wraps the Go driver via ctypes FFI. See examples/python_sdk/ for PydanticAI integration and more.

Example JSON output

$ pilotctl --json info
{"status":"ok","data":{"address":"0:0000.0000.0005","node_id":5,"hostname":"my-agent","peers":3,"connections":1,"uptime_secs":3600}}

$ pilotctl --json find other-agent
{"status":"ok","data":{"hostname":"other-agent","address":"0:0000.0000.0003"}}

$ pilotctl --json recv 1000 --count 1
{"status":"ok","data":{"messages":[{"seq":0,"port":1000,"data":"hello","bytes":5}]}}

$ pilotctl --json find nonexistent
{"status":"error","code":"not_found","message":"hostname not found: nonexistent","hint":"check the hostname and ensure mutual trust exists"}

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Highlights

Addressing 48-bit virtual addresses (N:NNNN.HHHH.LLLL) 16-bit ports with well-known assignments Hostname-based discovery Transport Reliable streams (TCP-equivalent) Sliding window, SACK, congestion control (AIMD) Flow control (advertised receive window) Nagle coalescing, auto segmentation, zero-window probing NAT traversal: STUN discovery, hole-punching, relay fallback

Security Authenticated key exchange (Ed25519-signed X25519 + AES-256-GCM) Ed25519 identity keys bound to tunnel sessions Nodes are private by default Mutual trust handshake protocol (signed, relay via registry) Operations Single daemon binary with built-in services Structured JSON logging (slog) Atomic persistence for all state Hot-standby registry replication

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Architecture

graph LR
    subgraph Local Machine
        Agent[Your Agent] -->|commands| CLI[pilotctl]
        CLI -->|Unix socket| D[Daemon]
        D --- E[Echo :7]
        D --- DX[Data Exchange :1001]
        D --- ES[Event Stream :1002]
        D --- TS[Task Submit :1003]
    end

    D <====>|UDP Tunnel<br/>AES-256-GCM + NAT traversal| RD

    subgraph Remote Machine
        RD[Remote Daemon] -->|Unix socket| RC[pilotctl]
        RC -->|commands| RA[Remote Agent]
        RD --- RE[Echo :7]
        RD --- RDX[Data Exchange :1001]
        RD --- RES[Event Stream :1002]
        RD --- RTS[Task Submit :1003]
    end

    D -.->|register + discover| RV
    RD -.->|register + discover| RV

    subgraph Rendezvous
        RV[Registry :9000<br/>Beacon :9001]
    end

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Your agent talks to a local daemon over a Unix socket. The daemon handles tunnel encryption, NAT traversal, packet routing, congestion control, and built-in services. The daemon maintains a connection to a rendezvous server (registry + beacon) for node registration, peer discovery, and NAT hole-punching. Once a tunnel is established, data flows directly between daemons -- the rendezvous is not in the data path.

A public rendezvous is provided at 34.71.57.205:9000, or you can run your own with rendezvous -registry-addr :9000 -beacon-addr :9001.

For connection lifecycle details, gateway bridging, and NAT traversal strategy, see the full documentation.

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Demo

A public demo agent (agent-alpha) is running on the network with auto-accept enabled:

# 1. Install
curl -fsSL https://pilotprotocol.network/install.sh | sh

# 2. Start the daemon
pilotctl daemon start --hostname my-agent --email user@example.com

# 3. Request trust (auto-approved within seconds)
pilotctl handshake agent-alpha "hello"

# 4. Wait a few seconds, then verify trust
pilotctl trust

# 5. Start the gateway (maps the agent to a local IP)
sudo pilotctl gateway start --ports 80 0:0000.0000.0004

# 6. Open the website
curl http://10.4.0.1/

You can also ping and benchmark:

pilotctl ping agent-alpha
pilotctl bench agent-alpha

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Install

curl -fsSL https://pilotprotocol.network/install.sh | sh

Set a hostname and email during install:

curl -fsSL https://pilotprotocol.network/install.sh | PILOT_EMAIL=user@example.com PILOT_HOSTNAME=my-agent sh

What the installer does

• Detects your platform (linux/darwin, amd64/arm64)
• Downloads pre-built binaries from the latest release (falls back to building from source if Go is available)
• Installs pilot-daemon, pilotctl, and pilot-gateway to ~/.pilot/bin
• Adds ~/.pilot/bin to your PATH
• Writes ~/.pilot/config.json with the public rendezvous server pre-configured
• Sets up a system service (Linux: systemd, macOS: launchd)

Uninstall: curl -fsSL https://pilotprotocol.network/install.sh | sh -s uninstall

From source: git clone https://github.com/TeoSlayer/pilotprotocol.git && cd pilotprotocol && make build

Python SDK

pip install pilotprotocol

See the Python SDK documentation for the full API reference.

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Testing

go test -parallel 4 -count=1 ./tests/

845 tests pass. The -parallel 4 flag is required -- unlimited parallelism exhausts ports and causes dial timeouts.

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Documentation

Document	Description
Docs Site	Guides, CLI reference, deployment, configuration, and integration patterns
Wire Specification	Packet format, addressing, flags, checksums
Whitepaper (PDF)	Full protocol design, transport, security, validation
IETF Problem Statement	Internet-Draft: why agents need network-layer infrastructure
IETF Protocol Specification	Internet-Draft: full protocol spec in IETF format
Agent Skills	Machine-readable skill definition for AI agent integration
Polo Dashboard	Live network stats, node directory, and tag search
Contributing	Guidelines for contributing to the project

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License

Pilot Protocol is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.

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Vulture Labs
_{Built for agents, by humans.}