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Agent Covenant
/covenant
A formal pledge of agent capabilities, performance, and safety guarantees: latency, accuracy, uptime, and compliance.
Strata: L0
Axes: Governance, Observability
Status: seed
Explainer
A covenant is the behavioral contract between an agent and its users/operators. It specifies: what the agent commits to do (capability boundary), how fast (latency SLA), with what accuracy (quality threshold), under what conditions (fault resilience), and in compliance with what policies (safety constraints). Covenants are machine-testable — they become the basis for automated eval frameworks and production monitoring.
Anti-Patterns
- Deploying agents without explicit performance guarantees or safety pledges leads to misaligned expectations and production surprises.
Mitigations
- Define a machine-testable covenant for each agent: capability boundary, latency SLA, quality threshold, fault resilience, and compliance policies. Instrument monitoring and evals against this covenant.