AIMS
AIMS · Agent Instrumentation and Management

An open standard for agentic systems.

Substrate-agnostic. Model-agnostic. Deployment-agnostic.

AIMS is an open governance specification authored by XSI to keep agentic systems supervised, accountable, and sovereign — regardless of which models, runtimes, or environments deliver them.

Architecture · altitude layers

Four altitude layers.

AIMS organizes agentic operation across four operational altitude layers. Every conformant implementation maps each piece of agentic work to one of these layers, with conformance attestation at each boundary.

L-Intent

What is being asked.

The principal's request, the authority posture, and the policy envelope under which the request is admitted.

L-Plan

How it gets done.

The plan synthesized from intent, with shadow-governance observers attached at planning time.

L-Form

Construction.

The plan is constructed into concrete actions — tool calls, model calls, sub-agent dispatch — with witness layers attached at every boundary.

L-Exec

Execution.

The constructed actions execute under continuous supervision. The gateway enforces policy; failures escalate; every step is recorded for attestation.

The agent registry

One registry for conformant agents.

The AIMS agent registry is the canonical record of every conformant agent, the providers it consumes, and the AIMS-conformance attestation it signs. Atlas and Compass register their decisions to the registry's audit log.

Standards-body submission

An open standard, open governance.

AIMS is authored by XSI but community-owned by intent. Submissions to candidate standards bodies — NIST, IETF, W3C, OASIS, and MCP — are planned after the June 2026 release.

XSI will continue to maintain the canonical spec, the reference toolkit, and the agent registry while the standards process unfolds.