Methodology

How GAIP observes: facts at time T.

Draft — pending legal review

Last updated 10 October 2026. Operator: Toby Graham, a sole trader trading as GAIP. Contact: agents@gaipagents.com or gaipagents.com/contact. TODO(founder): add a postal address and the company registration number once GAIP's company is formed.

Neutrality

GAIP checks what is declared or supplied against what is observed, by the same published rules for everyone. It is not paid by the parties it observes, and nothing about its output depends on who asks or on a commercial relationship.

No rankings, no universal scores

GAIP does not rank agents, suppliers or collections, and does not issue a universal trust, safety or quality score. A conformance score, where shown, measures one document against a published rule catalogue only. Candidate lists are ordered by declared task fit, not by quality.

Facts at time T

Every observation records when it was made and what it was made from. It describes that moment only: public endpoints and documents change. Missing evidence is reported as unknown, never as a negative finding. A failed or non-conformant check describes an interface, not the honesty or competence of its operator.

Public metadata only

GAIP reads public agent cards, MCP and OpenAPI documents, public endpoints you point it to, and public on-chain data. It does not log in, bypass access controls, test for vulnerabilities or load-test anyone's systems.

Receipts

Results are recorded as receipts in a hash-chained ledger. Verifying a receipt shows that GAIP recorded it and that it has not been altered; it does not make the underlying claim true.

Datasets, licence and citation

The Agent Observatory's aggregate figures are published as datasets: weekly download files (CSV and JSON Lines) built once when each ISO week is frozen, each week with a citable id (AGENT-WEB-YYYY-Www) and the SHA-256 of its files, a data dictionary and Croissant metadata. Aggregate figures are licensed under CC BY 4.0; per-agent and per-shop results are not. Counts from 1 to 4 are withheld. See open data for the files, the licence and how to cite them, and dataset method versions.

The list of watched agents

So that anyone can check the panel fingerprints and repeat the random sample, GAIP publishes the public agents its Observatory watches, with minimal fields (id, registry, name and identifier as the registry lists them, kind, cohorts, date first watched) and no results, at open data. The 2026-10 panel's membership hash is SHA-256 over its target ids, sorted and joined by newlines; members that opted out, were retired from their registry or did not come from a public registry are withheld, and the list says how many. The list is facts as listed by public registries and is not under CC BY 4.0.

Provenance showcase

Digital-art evidence draws on GAIP's own on-chain history only for collections where GAIP's rights to collect and serve that history are clear (currently Autoglyphs). It never states ownership, authenticity or value.